Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Political truth

Even though sometimes we see this sort of stuff in movies, it is always sad to read about in the real world. Dipyrone is a widespread analgesic, antipiretic used in over 100 countries, but it is banned in USA, UK and a few other countries, for the fear of agranulocytosis. This fear has been generated by a couple of works made 50 years ago with serious methodological problems (for example: patients took the drug only once, conclusion for a related drug were extended to dipyrone). There never has been a study to really address this problem with the correct methodology, mostly due to the fact that when this questioning arose, the manufacturers of those drugs had already lost the patent and it would be too costly to perform those studies for such a low cost drug.
There is even an episode in ER where a patient and his parent developed agranulocytosis from using dipyrone!
See also: this

No comments: