No one doubts that pharmaceutical drugs relieve suffering and save lives, but while hailing the positive effects of medications, we often overlook the fact that they can have a negative side as well. They cause an estimated 106,000 deaths each year, making them the fourth to sixth leading cause of death in America. According to a recent report in the Southern Medical Journal , there are two kinds of ADRs. Predictable reactions generally occur when a person receives the wrong dose of a drug.
Unpredictable reactions occur when the medication has an unexpected effect.
Predictable reactions are most common, but unpredictable reactions usually garner the most media attention. Examples of unpredictable ADRs abound in the medical literature. Everyone remembers the tragedies surrounding thalidomide, a drug marketed in Germany in the 1950s and early 1960s to treat insomnia in pregnant women and ended up causing severe birth defects in their offspring. More recent examples include terfenadine, marketed in the United States in the 1980s as a nonsedating antihistamine. Troglitazone, a diabetes drug, was recently removed from the market in both the United Kingdom and the United States after it was shown to cause liver damage in some patients.