Bang Guy...I'm sorry to hear your dad settled...he should have fought tooth and nail, and make the biggest stink ever and sell the story to the news. Shame on the people who had the Chutzbah (nerve) to be so ungrateful.
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Originally Posted by
Beth 
The ambulance chaser thing is not a result of just 1 person having a bad side effect. It is usually because several people have had a bad side effect, including perhaps even death. How would your family feel if you had actually died from that drug? How would they feel if you had died, and they learned that an alternative drug was available that you could have used that had a safer track record?
It is up to the pharmaceutical companies to perform enough QC to ensure safety, not release a drug and then see what happens. Likely the drug you took was pulled off the market, or there are attempts being made to pull it off the market.
While the class action law suits you describe totally benefits the lawyers, and not the injured party, still, don't assume that pharmaceutical companies are pro-your good health. They are pro-making money. They push new, expensive drugs on physicians. Ever see the guy with the tie and suitcase coming and going from your doctor's office? That is the pharmaceutical rep getting your doctor to push new drug freebie samples on patients. The doctor, in effect, is the advertiser for the new drug.
Best course of action is to stay away from new drugs, until they have been tested on other human guinea pigs for a few years.
I understand 100% that money is the gear that turns the whole worlds business ethics...I'm afraid that when you are on the delivery table bleeding to death is too late to ask for a certain alternative drug....At that point we just have to trust our doctors, hopfully he/she is pro-our good health.
Was the drug given me taken off the market???? Well it took them 11 years to make the link between young mothers and heart attacks. 3 months after my son was born I had a massive heart attack, damaging the entire left side of my heart. No drugs were in my system, nothing to link the medicine to my condition. Until many other women suffered the same, and it became the one anomaly between them all. Then before it is pulled off the market...it has to be proven that that drug alone was to blame, and I wonder how long that takes.
I'm with you, I don't take a med until it's been on the market for a while to see if it does cause whatever side effect. The truth is that there are no safe drugs, they all alter our bodies and trick it into doing or not doing certain functions. Any medicine, over the counter, or from the doctor, will do damage to some organ of the body if it is taken long enough. The less we depend on them the better.
I still am annoyed at the constant letters I get in the mail about signing up for a class action suit. Nobody knew there was even a problem for 11 years, also did it cause the heart to fail for all who took it? I doubt it, it was my fate that I was 1 in 100, and at that time and place it was my doctors best choice.....it did save my life.