Lake Charles readers who check up on this blog regularly are probably familiar with dangerous drugs like Avandia that were once thought to be safe but were later discovered to have very serious negative health consequences. They might ask, then, how a dangerous drug like this ever gets into the market in the first place.

The good news is that U.S. consumers do have a watchdog in place. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration is often criticized for being too strict in the way it reviews new medicines. Recently, the FDA refused to allow Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca to sell a new type of experimental diabetes drugs, in part because it learned its lesson with Avandia, which was once thought to be safe but was later revealed to contribute to heart attacks in certain patients.

That being said, dangerous drugs sometimes do slip through. There are several reasons for this. The first is that medication is getting more and more specific, so sometimes people only focus on what it is intended to treat and don't look at its impact on the body as a whole. Other times, regulators and drug makers fail to take into account how the drugs will function in combination with lifestyle choices (something as simple as drinking grapefruit juice, for example, can negate the benefits of certain cholesterol drugs). And sometimes, the answer is just that a mistake was made and the drug should not have been allowed on the market at all.


If you believe that your health has been harmed because of a dangerous drug, you should know that you have the right to speak to an attorney about whether a lawsuit would be a good idea.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek, "Bristol, AstraZeneca Diabetes Drug Fails to win FDA backing," Jan. 23, 2012