Quest for Health in Drugs Finds 'Unintended' Side Effects That Kill

Let’s say that strong recommendations are being given by the medical system to drug most people on reaching a certain age. Then, let’s say your company produces software to analyze the risk of developing medical conditions. Since you want to make buckets of money from your product, what could be better than doing a study to show that it can predict who is most likely to suffer from the side effects of the drug being pushed? That’s exactly what a recent study hyped by Reuters and BBC is about.

The Reuters headline reads: Cholesterol drug side effects need watching: study

BBC’s headline says: ‘Unintended’ statin side-effect risks uncovered

Both are misleading.

There’s No Such Thing As a Side Effect

The term side effect is utterly misleading. It implies that a pharmaceutical drug has, primarily, one single and beneficial effect, and that others are relatively minor. That’s far from reality. A drug is a chemical with a range of effects. It’s used in the hope that one of those effects will be positive and the rest will be ignored or can be swept under the rug long enough to make big profits off the positive effect.

There are, of course, exceptions. Sometimes more than one effect can be sold as beneficial. Consider cold medications that dry out mucus membranes, but have the unwanted effect of causing drowsiness. That resulted in warnings on labels not to use them when operating machinery. However, some smart marketers realized that the “side effect” could be sold as a benefit. So, the same drugs are sold as sleep aids, with the “side effect” of drying mucus membranes.

Obviously, a side effect is merely a matter of perception. If we like an effect, then a drug is sold for it. If we don’t, then we call it a side effect. The reality, though, is that every drug is simply a chemical with a range of effects. The ones we like are used to make profits, and the dangerous ones are minimized by calling them side effects.

The Study in Question

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) plans to massively increase the use of statins, probably by as much as 30% per year. The goal is to have at least 1 in 4 adults over the age of 40 on them. However, statins are known to have serious adverse effects.

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