"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Dubious Worth: Pfizer has been conducting a study of their hormone replacement drug, FemHRT, to see if it makes a woman's skin prettier. The merits of such research are now being called into question in light of the recent revelation of small, very small, increases in breast cancer and heart disease among users of hormone replacement therapy. It’s annoying to see the phrase “small but significant increase” repeated so often about the hormone replacement study. The increases were indeed small, (only 8 per 10,000 cases of breast cancer and 42 per 10,000 cases of heart disease in users of hormones) and only “significant” in a statisitical sense. That is, the increases weren’t likely to be have been due to chance. They aren’t, however, significant in the sense that they involved large numbers of women, which is what that phrase “small but significant” conveys. Still, it’s also hard to feel sympathy for the drug company regarding this trial. They obviously designed their study so they could apply for permission to claim that their product enhanced skin beauty, a claim that would give them a marketing edge. How do you objectively measure skin quality, anyway? Beauty’s only skin deep,after all. posted by Sydney on
9/09/2002 07:32:00 AM
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