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While pregnant, children's television host Sherri Finkbine took thalidomide that her husband had purchased over-the-counter in Europe.[43] When she learned that thalidomide was causing fetal deformities she wanted to abort her pregnancy, but the laws of Arizona allowed abortion only if the mother's life was in danger. Finkbine traveled to Sweden to have the abortion. Thalidomide was found to have deformed the fetus.[41]
Oh how we're going backwards.
Frances Oldham Kelsey at the FDA in the United States almost single-handedly, and while under enormous pressure, kept Thalidomide out if the USA for insufficient safety testing.
One reason that Americans are a bit less familiar with this horrific story.
The reason drug ads all say "may cause [list of terrible things]" ultimately traces back to thalidomide.
The system which requires the monitoring and reporting of potentially adverse events, even after a drug has got through trials is called pharmacovigilance. That's what generates the data those risks are based on and it was developed in the wake of the thalidomide disaster to help prevent it from happening again.
Yep but if they make a list as large as the medical dictionary it's not really helpful is it
That's why they report common side effects, uncommon side effects, and rare side effects. The rare ones often aren't even caused by the drug in question; they're just medical things that came up for someone incidentally while taking the medication, but they still have to be reported just in case.
It's insane seeing American ads where they tell you they have a new pill and follow it with a list of genuinely horrific possibilities 'may make your spleen gain it's own sentience, may invade Poland, stop taking if your penis swells to 80x its normal size and weaps tears of flaming blood...'
Are Americans so used to it that they just tune it all out like with the California cancer warnings? I feel like I could never get used to that and I'd probably end up a paranoid doctor avoiding loon with warnings about big pharma written all over my car.
I don't know who those commercials are even for. It's not like you can walk into a pharmacy and get whatever you want. A doctor still has to prescribe it to you and hopefully they're not letting patients decide what to prescribe.
Thalidomide was originally created in Nazi Germany as a sedative for healthy, non-pregnant adults. After the war many of the drugs created during the war were boxed up by German pharmaceutical companies. The story of Thalidomide is simply mind-blowing from start to finish.