It was stuff I'd been complaining about. She will spend this week at Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore, undergoing brain scans and other tests. But she also wonders about the safety of all American prescription drugs. You put all your faith in the government and the FDA and then it slaps you in the face. The unnerving answer is that, while unusual, the fen-phen fiasco isn't a fluke.
All prescription drugs enter the market with their long-term safety and effectiveness unknown.
But many consumers don't. Monitoring of drug side effects in the real world is lackadaisical at best, and doctors are free to prescribe drugs in ways the FDA has not intended, such as using fenfluramine and phentermine together. The FDA asked American Home Products Corp., the maker of Redux and Pondimin, to take the drugs off the market. No one knows if the drugs caused the heart damage, but the correlation was frightening. Before the August 27 Journal of the American Medical Association article on brain damage in animals fed dexfenfluramine and fenfluramine, doctors reported having seen problems in patients.