Is Your Medicine Cabinet Safe?

by Greg Martin

Walk into your bathroom. Open your medicine cabinet and take a look. What do you see? Robitussin? Advil? Dimetapp? Do you know who makes these products? More important, do you know whether or not they're safe?

All of these products are manufactured by American Home Products - a giant pharmaceutical company which last year changed its name to Wyeth, Inc. Wyeth makes a heck of a Chap Stick, but they also made a number of products whose side effects were more problematic. Products like the Dalkon shield IUD (withdrawn from the market after it caused infertility in thousands of women); RotaShield rotavirus vaccine (the only childhood vaccine ever withdrawn from the market); Cordarone (an anti-arrhythmiac heart medication which caused blindness in some users); and most recently Pondimin or fenfluramine (half of the infamous "fen-phen" diet drug combination). Pondimin ws recalled from the market after Dr. Heidi Connolly and others at the Mayo Clinic reported serious valvular heart disease among patients using the drug for weight loss.

In fact, more drugs have been withdrawn from the market over the last decade than during the entire history of the FDA prior to that time.

This is not intended to single out Wyeth in particular; Wyeth comes to mind because we recently completed a group of cases on behalf of North Carolina residents injured after taking fen-phen. Other major pharmaceutical companies have track records that are nearly as bad. Hoffmann-La Roche's acne drug Accutane, for example, has been implicated causing birth defects; Warner-Lambert's diabetes drug Rezulin caused severe liver damage in some users; and Bayer's anti-cholesterol drug, Baycol, caused a rare muscle disease called rhabdomyolysis. The list goes on. In fact, more drugs have been withdrawn from the market over the last decade than during the entire history of the FDA prior to that time.

So how can you be sure that the drugs in your medicine cabinet are safe? Well, one thing that can help is to read the label. Under federal regulations, drug companies must label their products with instructions for proper usage and warnings about any significant side effects. The drug's label is printed on the "package insert" (the flyer the pharmacist gives you along with your medication) and is also published in a reference book called The Physicians' Desk Reference, or PDR, which is available at your public library. You should thoroughly read the drug's label each time you begin taking a new medication, and discuss any questions with your doctor.