Pill Secrets The Efficiency of Drugs

Modem anti-inflammatory drags are very safe and inexpensive. Willow bark is difficult to take in a controlled manner, and does not inhibit blood clot formation, so it has no importance as a modem pharmaceutical. This plant was very important in developing modem drags, but its direct use wottld be a huge step backward. 

The efficacy of medicines is often questioned. Even within a family, opirrions may vary. Why do medicines have different effects on different people Does the lack of effects on an individual render a medicine useless Are there approved medicines that may not be effective at all  

On the surface, things are crystal clear. The basic requirement to register an active ingredient as a medicine is that it should have a desirable effect on humans. But when these effects are first tested, they are not tested on hrrmans directly, but on cell cultures or receptors in laboratory studies. If these investigations yield positive 

pharmaceutical companies sometimes pull certain medicines from the market even if authorities do not require them to do so. An example is the cholesterol lowering drug cerivastatin, which had side effects similar to other related drags, but its manufacturer decided that these side effects were too cotmnon and stopped selhng the medicine. 

The efficacy is proved in human tests involving a sufficiently high number of patients taking quite a long time, so that there could be no doubt about the results. Not only is a placebo used as comparison (— 3.6), but other known similar medicines 

---