Author: Diary of a Quitter
Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 9:16 pm
People also seem to forget – or maybe they just don’t know – that pretty much every drug that is approved by the FDA, so in other words ALL prescription medication in the US, is only studied in the short-term when they do the studies for the approval process.
Antidepressants are a great example. When they do the studies to determine the safety and efficacy of a new antidepressant medication, the study participants will usually only be on the medication for 6 or maybe 12 weeks. That’s pretty much standard, but most of the time people will stay on these medications for much longer than that. Years even, yet the FDA does not require the pharma companies to collect any long-term data about the safety or the side effects.
And here’s another thing to think about – when drugs are studied they are usually studied in isolation. The study participant will likely only be on one medication during the study, or maybe two. Now think about how many of us have been on multiple drug cocktails in our lives. Take me for instance – I take a pill for depression, one for migraines, one for thyroid, one for edema, and in the past I’ve taken another migraine drug, an anxiety medication, a muscle relaxant…you get the picture.
Do you think anyone is studying the risks of taking all of these pills together? Ha ha, no they are not. They really can’t, but doctors will continue to do poly-pharmacy because that’s how our healthcare system works.
So yeah, we are all pretty much guinea pigs for someone, and Reckitt, the maker of Suboxone, is hardly the worst offender. As Hat pointed out, buprenorphine has a long history of safe use as a pain medication and Suboxone has been in use for like 9 years now, so it’s not like nothing is known about these medications. Of course some things are not going to be known about a medication until it is used in a widespread fashion and Reckitt has been responsive to some of the information that they discovered – like they lowered their dosing guidelines when it became obvious that most people don’t need more than 16mgs a day. Hopefully they will also respond to the need for tapering doses soon.
