Coagulation and Adulteration -- Building on Science and Policy Lessons from 1905

doi:10.1056/NEJMp0803685

Volume 358:2429-2431		June 5, 2008		Number 23

Coagulation and Adulteration — Building on Science and Policy Lessons from 1905

Jerry Avorn, M.D.

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by Kishimoto, T. K.

PubMed Citation

It's always instructive and often painful to contrast the impressivedevelopment of medical science with the more fitful evolutionof health policy. The former marches forward more or less systematically;well-developed rules of evidence determine what works, and practicalmethods build on established facts and test new paradigms. Dataand concepts proven true are rarely discarded or forgotten.

Not so with health policy. Although the field's evaluation toolscan be rigorous, in practice what is proclaimed "true" oftendepends on who's doing the proclaiming and whose interests arebeing represented. As a result, though medical science has progressedfairly steadily, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Dr. Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Interfaculty Initiative on Medications and Society, and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital — all in Boston.

An interview with Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the Food and Drug Administration, can be heard at www.nejm.org.