From the NS archive: Swallowing it in silence
2 November 1984: Let the patients decide on the risk of drugs.
By Jad Adams
The people most ignorant about a prescription drug are the patients taking it, wrote Jad Adams in this article from 1984, which argued for a reconfiguring of the British pharmaceutical industry. According to a 1977 law, if pharmaceutical companies informed patients about a drug at all, they were obliged to provide a leaflet detailing information on all side effects. But the industry and doctors argued that juxtaposing major but rare side effects with minor, common ones resulted in a decrease in patient compliance. The (totally legal) alternative was for companies to give absolutely no information at all. Adams described a new method of identifying drug risks that involved doctors recording events which happened to a patient while they were taking the drug, whether they seemed related – a rash, for example – or not – perhaps a broken leg. “The obvious way to pick up side effects before people have died is simply to involve the patients themselves,” Adams asserted.