The point of our recent digression into the philosophy of science is to highlight that doing great science is hard. It takes time.
Doing great science about human beings and health — especially to assess long term health benefits and costs — is also incredibly time consuming and expensive. Human beings are complex creatures. Studying the effect of one isolated activity (e.g. taking a drug, not taking a drug) over a long time takes an awful lot of scrutiny. Biases — among researchers, among journalists and among the people who strive to act on the information from the studies — can easily corrupt the process. For instance, a researcher might do an excellent experiment, but if science journalists miscommunicate the findings, all that good work can come to naught.
Sometimes, science does not yield an immediate answer. Alternatively, new ideas can emerge to challenge conventional wisdom years after the fact. For instance, consider the case of a hypothetical medicine, Drug X. Researchers test Drug X and find that it appears to have no side effects. Fiver years later, however, new experiments show that Drug X causes a bad side effect in a small subclass of patients. This new science needs to be communicated, so that doctors avoid prescribing a medicine that could hurt the vulnerable subclass of patients.
The Slow Plodding Pace of Science Meets the Lightning Pace of Technology
Great science takes time to do and to communicate, and it is by its very nature sluggish — bureaucratic, even. At the same time, medical technology is a booming business. Drug companies (and the medical and patient communities, to a certain extent) want progress, and they want it now. To some extent, modern medicine fetishizes pill-based solutions. People want pills to make them beautiful, pills to cure diseases, pills to make us live longer, and pills to resolve the side effects created by the other pills.
The glacial pace of “good science” simply cannot keep up with the accelerated pace of medical technology. It is the battle of the irresistible force meets the immovable object, and something has to give. As the Risperdal debacle demonstrates, “good science” often buckles first.
(In our books about the drugs GranuFlo and Lipitor, we noted a similar trend: drug companies develop and push solutions in spite of ambiguous science. In some ways, all three stories share the same tragic plot line.)
Does the true origin of the Risperdal debacle really matter, on a practical level? Injured patients (and their families) want answers and solutions. Perhaps executive greed, bad science, and bad luck all played a role in what happened.
In event case, two key questions remain:
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What happens when people develop gynecomastia?
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What can be done about it?
More on those questions next time. For insight into your Risperdal case, call the Davis & Crump team now at 800-277-0300.
