Modern pharmaceuticals and advances in medicine have greatly enhanced the quality of life for individuals around the world. However, there is a dark side to the benefit drugs have delivered in the modern era. The impending pressure by drug companies to be continuously profitable in a competitive world market has paved a dangerous path whereby patients have been hurt and in some cases killed as a result of defective drug products in the marketplace. There are several reasons for this dilemma that has caused defective drugs to gain traction in the market. The most obvious again is profit. The pharma lobby is among the most powerful in the world. Couple this with profitability and you have a recipe for potential disaster to the consumer.
The FDA & Dangerous Drugs
The US FDA is underfunded and although they generally do a good job to protect U.S. citizens, they have limited resources and priorities sometimes go by the wayside. The FDA doesn’t always make drug companies finish their clinical trials. If they deem a higher benefit-to-risk ratio and find that a drug trial has found a statistically significant difference between the actual drug and placebo, the FDA will green light the marketing of the new drug. Unfortunately, this does not account for long-term adverse drug effects that can appear with larger sample populations, potentially serious effects that sometimes cannot be seen until the drug prematurely comes to market. When reviewing innovative new drugs, the FDA will often convene an advisory panel of outside experts to review the research on a drug and make recommendations. According to a conflict-of-interest policy adopted at the end of the Bush administration, those panels can't include anyone who's taken money from the company whose drug is under consideration. On the surface, that makes sense. But in practice, because the world of true experts in a specialized field can be very small, you're excluding the people who have actually written the key papers in the field. What ends up happening is the FDA will often get bad advice from these panels, because the people involved are not actually the real experts in that particular disease.
Contact a Defective Drug Attorney Today!
If you or a loved one has suffered serious medical complications or wrongful death due to prescription drugs, you have the right to claim compensation for your losses.
The Venardi Law Firm aggressively seeks compensation in cases involving defective drug products. We are diligent in preparing cases, and our Walnut Creek, San Francisco, Oakland, Marin County or Santa Cruz defective drug attorneys are determined to use the legal system to get results for our clients. Mark Venardi will organize a comprehensive legal effort to determine what exactly happened and whether the drug company was responsible. Our staff includes a full-time clinical pharmacist who specializes in defective drug products as well as access to a full range of medical experts in all fields related to drug litigation. For more information call (925) 478-5557 or email us today.
