I hope no one minds if I copy some choice quotes from his comments here:
> Only three of the events were withdrawals, meaning that only 1.3% of approved drugs were recalled off the market.
> In 2006, the FDA added a boxed warning to warfarin, a blood thinner which at that time had been out 52 years, saying that if you took too much of it, it could make your blood too thin.
> Another example: antipsychotics are not FDA-approved for dementia. I don’t even know if any company has ever tried to get antipsychotics FDA-approved for dementia. Giving demented people antipsychotics is a bad idea if there’s any other option. But people do it anyway, and then the demented people get heart problems and die. The FDA eventually figured that out and put a boxed warning on antipsychotics not to give them to demented people if possible. This didn’t show up before approval because nobody wanted them to be given to demented people so there was no study about whether it was a good idea.
I didn't like his comments about the warning against combining opioids and benzos, because the US has seen a large increase (admittedly of small numbers) of deaths from this combination since 2000.
I was recently reading "American Sickness" by Elisabeth Rosenthal. She was talking about how an anti-nausea medication was taken off the market for safety issues because it caused heart issues at 50 times the dose usually taken. After doctors were forced to use Zofran instead, which costs at least 20 times more.
Residents are in a pretty good spot to write things like this. Fresh enough to have their fingers on the pulse. But, just becoming seasoned enough to pick out WTFs.
[1] https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/160559317596/kit...