Distributed Full Disclosure Medical Development

In a time of rapid progress in biotechnology, the Hippocratic pledge of "first do no harm" kills a lot of people. It just doesn't kill them as directly as more obvious means. Taken to its extreme, "first do no harm" is a strong precautionary principle, it forbids progress, it forbids the testing of new therapies. While we are not at the point of forbiddance yet, regulators have been heading in that direction for years. Officials at the FDA and similar regulatory bodies are willing to accept great ongoing suffering and death in the service of reducing the risk of harm due to new therapies to as close to zero as possible. The costs of regulatory compliance and degree of proof required for novel medical technologies scale upward year after year, and, accordingly, the pace of progress slows while patients continue to die. Medicine in the clinic lags far behind what is possible in the laboratory. This isn't the best way forward for an era of revolutionary advances in biotechnology, information science, communication technologies. A different paradigm must emerge, one that will lead to more rapid development of new medicines and a lower overall toll of death and suffering. Consider the following, which I will call Distributed Full Disclosure Medical Development, in which information is the currency by which, on an ongoing and incremental basis, the safety and success or failure of therapies can be judged, and patients can make their own informed decisions, guided or unguided...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Politics and Legislation Source Type: blogs