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September 18, 2006
Got pain? Me too.
by Peter Pitts
Here’s another swat at the myth of me-tooism — not all Cox-2 medicines are alike.
I know, duh, right? But it sounds so much better when you read about it in the Gray Lady. Here’s how Alex Berenson began his story on the topic:
“Vioxx, which is no longer on the market, may have posed heart risks that a similar drug, Celebrex, and other painkillers do not, according to two papers published yesterday by The Journal of the American Medical Association.”
There you have it. And if it’s in the New York Times it must be true, right? Well, yes — at least in this case. And it’s an important one.
Today’s lesson is that the public health value of multiple medicines within the same therapeutic class must not be arbitrarily waved away. Just as there are no “me-too” patients, so too are there no “me-too” drugs. An expanded pharmaceutical armamentarium offers both doctors and patients the opportunity to choose the right drug for each individual patient based on a plethora of mitigating factors — including the risk profile.
Personalized medicine. Get it?
One “class” that clearly doesn’t get it, the Retailers of Recreancy and Rapacity (trial lawyers and their allies), must not be permitted to tar an entire class when risks are found in a single product. There are varying risks and benefits among different products in a single class as well as among different classes of drugs used to treat the same disease.
That’s called progress.
Posted by Peter Pitts at September 18, 2006 07:07 AM
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