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medpundit |
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Wednesday, June 05, 2002The Washington Post article, however, takes the issue a step further than necessary or even warranted. It gives too much credence to all the other bad news reports about the drugs: "Last year, research indicated that Vioxx patients ran four times more risk of heart attack than patients taking aspirin or ibuprofen. Last summer, a study published in the British journal The Lancet associated Vioxx with kidney failure. In March of this year, the FDA reported that five people taking Vioxx had been hospitalized with aseptic meningitis, an inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. And just last week came a report showing that Vioxx and Celebrex slowed the healing of bone fractures in lab animals." All of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs used to treat arthritis, including all of the older, cheaper ones, are capable of causing kidney failure. Considering the number of people who take Vioxx, it is almost impossible to pin the incredibly small number of five cases of meningitis to the drug. The study on delayed bone healing was performed on rats, not people. (Although it's probably true that anti-inflammatories delay healing in general. Inflammation serves a purpose in nature, and one of those purposes is to get all the body's healing mechanisms flowing to the site of injury.) The drugs shouldn't be completely condemned outright. The fact remains that there are a lot of people out there who get nausea and stomach discomfort when using the older and cheaper arthritis medicines who don’t get those symptoms on Vioxx and Celebrex. There are also, people who have failed to respond to the older medicines and have found relief with one of these two medications. Unfortunately, media reports like this one convince them the drugs are too dangerous to take, which isn't true. They just aren't as superior as we were led to believe. posted by Sydney on 6/05/2002 06:02:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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