Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16018

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: book

O'Meara A.
Chasing Medical Miracles - The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials
: Walker Books 2009
http://www.walkerbooks.com/books/catalog.php?key=818

Abstract:

Clinical trials affect everyone’s health, whether you enroll in one or
not.

Journalist Alex O’Meara is one of the more than twenty million
Americans enrolled in a clinical trial three times as many people as a
decade ago. Indeed, clinical trials have become a $24 billion industry that
is reshaping every aspect of health-care development and delivery in the
United States and around the world.

As O’Meara chronicles,
twentieth-century medical trials have led to epic advances in health care,
from asthma inhalers and insulin pumps to heart valves and pacemakers. And
yet, although regulations safeguard against grossly unethical tests,
significant problems are still associated with how clinical trials are
carried out and reported. For example, despite eight clinical trials for
Vioxx before the FDA approved it in 1998 for use as a painkiller, Merck took
it off the market in 2004, too late for the eighty-eight thousand Americans
who suffered heart attacks while taking Vioxx and the thirty-eight thousand
who died.

Chasing Medical Miracles is the first book to give readers a
behind-the-scenes look at the complicated world of clinical trials,
revealing how a multibillion-dollar industry of private companies conducting
them with little oversight has taken root and quietly become a major part of
the American medical establishment. Whether you are participating in a
clinical trial, considering that option, or interested in our medical
system, Alex O’Meara’s ground-breaking book is essential reading.

In the ethically murky world of clinical trials, Alex O’Meara’s book is an
illumination. Whether probing the use of Third World people to test U.S.
drugs, or revealing that the goal of clinical trials is not to cure anyone
but to obtain data, Chasing Medical Miracles is educational in a valuable
and troubling way – Stephen P. Kiernan, author of Last Rights: Rescuing the
End of Life from the Medical System

“Americans have long been mystified
about how new drugs are developed. Though the term ‘clinical trial’ has
entered the popular lexicon, most people still don’t know what goes on
behind the scenes. Chasing Medical Miracles tells the truth about the
byzantine world of clinical trials. O’Meara exposes the ethics of medical
research both in the U.S. and abroad. Essential reading for anyone who wants
to understand how new medicines are developed.” – Joe Graedon, M.S., and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D., authors of The People’s Pharmacy