Dr Trevor Mudge, Vice President of the Australian Medical Association, says there's often a very long list of potential side effects for most drugs. If you want a list of all the potential side effects of the drug, it's a very long list. It's there in the print in the consumer product information. Important ones will be discussed with patients. Basically doctors will talk to patients about the sort of risk that those doctors would want to know themselves as a patient.
Doctors are patients too.
But it's a question of getting these things in balance. And that's not an easy thing. Of course there are going to be side effects in risks of drugs. There are side effects in risks of not taking the drug too, and those are the sort of things that doctors and patients would weigh up in the course of a normal consultation. Well I'm not sure of the evidence of that.