Text: Hilary Venables. Article from the July 2014 issue of Noseweek Magazine.
Sixty percent of clinical drug trial results are not being shared with the public.
Never mind illegal drugs, prescription medication is being increasingly fingered as a major cause of premature death in rich countries. But they continue to be marketed and sold as though the risks were perfectly acceptable. A website called Rxisk.com could change all that.
“No one knows drug side-effects like the person who is taking a pill. Yet your voice is increasingly being silenced. You and your doctor may have been told there is no evidence linking the treatment you are on to the problems you are experiencing. This is because most data on prescription drugs is owned by the multinational pharmaceutical companies who run almost all clinical drug trials (60% of which are never reported). They simply are not sharing data that may affect their bottom lines.”
These words are not the ravings of a conspiracy theorist or religious cult, but the opinion of a team of medical and pharmacological professionals determined to shine a billion lights on the true risks of commonly prescribed medicines. Through their website, Rxisk.com, they are encouraging patients anywhere in the world to report adverse reactions they associate with taking prescription medicines.
The website provides a detailed reporting form which can be submitted directly to the Rxisk team. In return, the patient receives a personal assessment which they can show to their doctor or pharmacist, who in turn can provide feedback through a secure link.
Rxisk hopes that, by bringing doctors and pharmacists on board, they can build up a fuller picture of the impact of prescription drugs and react more quickly to signs of trouble.
Patients’ anonymised contributions are added to the site’s searchable database of 4.8 million adverse drug reactions associated with 35,000 different drug brand names.*
So if you want to know whether the anti-depressant you’ve been prescribed has been linked to sexual dysfunction, violent acts, suicide, anxiety, diabetes, birth defects or hair loss, you no longer
Website encourages patients throughout the world to report adverse reactions
have to rely on the heavily redacted literature enclosed in the pack, or your inadequately-informed shrink. You can also find out how various meds interact with each other, and what symptoms you may experience in quitting a particular drug. On top of all that, the Rxisk site offers live, personal consultations with members of its team through its online clinic.
Behind this valuable free service is an impressive line-up, headed by Dr David Healy, professor of psychiatry at Cardiff University and author of Pharmageddon (2012), one of the first books to expose the pernicious influence of Big Pharma on the practice of medicine. Also on the Rxisk team is Dr Ralph Edwards, former director of the World Health Organization’s Uppsala drug monitoring centre, as well as a raft of professors and senior scientists from medical research institutions in various parts of the world.
The site says adverse drug reactions are the fourth most common cause of death in US hospitals, and the numbers are even higher in mental health cases, where patients are less likely to be admitted before it is too late.
In the UK, adverse drug reactions account for one-in-16 hospital admissions and 4% of bed capacity. But Rxisk says it is clear that only a small fraction of serious events (those causing hospitalisation, disability or death) are ever reported and an even smaller fraction of the millions of “medically mild” events that affect concentration, judgement or the ability to care.
In South Africa, the Medicines Control Council is supposed to regulate the drug trade, but is not alone among such institutions for doing a pretty poor job. Like the US’s Federal Drug Administration (FDA), Health Canada, the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency and the European Medicines Agency, it has been accused of having too cosy relationships with the drug companies and being too easily satisfied with their unexamined assurances, backed only by their own research.
(Not to mention our local agency’s problems with skills shortages and a massive backlog of applications, many of them for completely untested products which go by the euphemism “complementary medicines”. See page 27.)
* The vast majority of those reports were recorded over decades by the FDA and it’s northern equivalent, Health Canada, but these are now being augmented by self-reporting from Rxisk users. In the first four months after its launch in November 2012, the Rxisk site generated more than 1,000 reports, more than those received by UK’s regulatory agency for the same period. Rxisk says it is hoping to include official data from more countries among its results in future.
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