Disregarding the rights of patients with drugs

[Des-Rez]

Are pharmaceutical companies disregarding the rights of patients with the drugs they make?

 

- I know that there are no laws making a person take any medicine involuntarily but suppose a change in mental behavior was suggested by doctors and also desired by the patient. What if a person took a psychoactive drug, as suggested by his doctors, changed but did not change the way he anticipated or wanted to?

- I have heard many stories of how people feel zombie-ish, their lives distorted, because of the drugs they have been prescribed. If this change considered irreversible then is that not taking away an individual’s right to live their life the way they want to?

- The changes are supposedly better in the eyes of a doctor but the patient now desires his old life because, even though considered inferior, he finds it appealing. It represents his individuality and uniqueness he used to have that is now drowned out by chemicals.

- Because of what pharmaceutical companies and doctors think the correct mental state of a healthy person is the patient is forced to live someone else’s idea of what life should be.

 

 

- Also in a related Question: What is the ideal / normal behavior pharmaceutical companies strive to achieve with their drugs? They have to have some sort of profile to work towards. They can’t just pump chemicals into the brain and roll dice with the results.

- The idea of what a proper person should be varies in different eyes. How can a pharmaceutical company or doctor say: ‘this drug will make you better’ but in fact after it has been taken, it is not the change anticipated and you are stuck in another mind not your own.

 

 

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I don't understand why people just can't stop feeling bad~MeetMeHalfway

[CharonY]

I think you are confusing who wants what. The companies are not per se interested in creating certain behaviors with their drugs. This is between the doctor and the patient to decide. They do provide pharmaceuticals that have demonstrated to influence conditions/diseases/whatever in a certain way that patients/doctors may find to be an improvement compared to their current condition.

What precisely the drug causes is what clinical trials are for. In the given test population the reactions are monitored and communicated to the FDA who will then approve (or not) whether the given medication will be useful in treating a given condition (that is the short of it, anyway).

One should also note that no medication works precisely in a given way. Organisms are terribly complicated systems and there can and will be several effects associated with any given medication. The trials are there to find out what, on average they may be. However individual differences can lead to unforeseeable results. Medicine is not deterministic and it cannot guarantee precisely the desired result. However, any medication has to be shown that in most cases improvements will be seen. In future there is the vision for individualized therapies in which omics data will be used to assess, for each person, whether any given medication may or may not be effective. But this is just a vision right now.

 

But to answer the initial question: I cannot see how providing medication does, in any way interfere with patient's rights. Of course a doctor can misinform a patient, maybe even due to incitement by pharma companies, but that is a different matter altogether.