What really makes a drug new? Most drugs on the market these days are called “me-too drugs” a drug that simply has taken the chemical formula from a pre-existing drug and altered it by a couple of molecules to make it new. The major question in this is which work better? Before drugs are approved by the FDA for sale they have to be proven effective, to prove this medical companies take a clinical trial group of young people (because they are proven to have less side effects, which makes the drug look better in the studies) and give many of them the real drug, the rest are given placebos. If the trial drug shows improvement in the patient compared to the placebo patients the drug is considered effective.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of different drugs all meant to cure or improve the same condition. Many people believe that newer drugs are better because they are more advanced, but in reality these drugs are just more advertised. Many times “the older drugs are just safer, both medically and economically”(96). The book The Truth about the Drug Companies brings up a great point, what if the drugs in the trial phase are pinned against an older drug of the same kind instead of a placebo? This would narrow down the amount of drugs available to the public so that people could only choose from the best.
It seems like the drug companies will do anything to allow their new drugs into the market but “are new drugs any better than the old ones? Are they worse? The worrying answer is that frequently we just don’t know. Too often, all we have is bias and hype”(114). From advertising to published medical journals it seems like the drug companies will say (or pay) anything for consumers to buy their product, even if it means putting the patients life at risk with a more dangerous drug than the cheap one that has been proven effective.
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