Prescription Medication Helps Only About Half of Those Who Take Them
Imagine you had been taking the drug Tamoxifen in hopes of preventing a recurrence of your breast cancer. Then a new test comes out that suggests that because of your genetic makeup the drug is not doing you any good. This situation is not that uncommon for hundreds of thousands of women in this country, including Illinois, who have been taking Tamoxifen.
However, not only those taking Tamoxifen need to worry. Experts say that regardless of the disease, most drugs work for only about half the people who take them. Not only is much of the nation’s approximate $300 billion annual drug spending wasted, but patients are being exposed unnecessarily to risky side effects.
Many policy experts are calling for more studies to compare the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much hope riding on the promise of “personalized medicine” in which genetic screening and other tests give doctors more evidence for tailored prescriptions. Personalized medicine would go beyond the norm by determining which drug or drugs are best suited for which patient, rather than continuing to treat everyone the same in hopes of benefiting the fortunate few.
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