Question: How confident are you that medicak trials are mostly correct?

anon answered on 18 Mar 2013:

Good question! I guess you mean how can we be sure that the results are right – and a new drug works without too many side effects?

To be able to know if a drug works, you have to test it in enough people that you know the results weren’t a fluke. Clever stats people have some rules & equations for figuring out how many people have to have a response to the drug for you to be able to say it’s effective. Before anyone takes part in a trial, the drug company has to write down what that number is and they can’t change it later to try & make the results look better than they really were!

For a drug company to be able to sell their product, people called regulators review all the data and decide if they agree with the stats people and the results. They also look at something called the risk/benefit ratio – you can think of that a balance of side effects vs beneficial effects. For something like a cold medicine, regulators aren’t likely to say it can be sold if it has a lot of side effects. For something like a cancer drug though, the balance changes – if the only way to save someone is with a drug that makes them sick for a while, it’s a risk worth taking.

Now…if you’re still reading & not bored yet… there’s also something called post-marketing surveillance, where drug companies have to monitor the safety of their products. Sometimes they can have very rare side effects that aren’t obvious in the clinical trials. Once a million people have taken the drug though, you’re more likely to spot a rare side effect.

I hope that explained it enough – leave me a comment if you have any questions 🙂