December 2009
1 post
Fashionable pharmaceuticals
The pharmaceuticals industry has an obsession with novelty. We want better drugs with fewer side-effects, but too often newness is correlated (wrongly) with an improvement in quality. One new drug that is twice as good at treating an illness as its predecessor is better than five drugs each offering a one per cent improvement on the first. ‘New’ drugs which appear on the market often seem to be...