John Arbuthnot on the Regulation of Drugs and Medicines

摘要

Human health, and ultimately human longevity, have benefited enormously from advances in medical practice and pharmaceuticals. Behind each, it is no secret, are formidable and sometimes competing interest groups with objectives that do not always coincide with those of their clients. Medicine, like other professions, has protective, guild-like features: it routinely asserts its expertise against the claims of various strains of less-credentialed practitioners and jealously guards its prerogatives against encroachment. The pharmaceutical industry is both a producer of life-saving drugs and a major corporate player in the economy. In the modern era of evidence-based medicine, assertions of treatment efficacy are a matter for empirical examination. Historically, however, physicians and pharmacists often struggled for professional dominance virtually in the dark—even when, as many have argued, their proffered interventions tended as often to shorten as to lengthen lives.