I see these disclaimers on all the prescription medicine commercials and always think to myself, “well no shit. But how is someone supposed to know without taking it?” Seriously. I just saw a commercial for a medicine that included that disclamer, called Opdivo, a biologic used to treat end-stage cancer. But you can substitute any particular drug, they all have it. How do you know if you are allergic to Predaxa without taking Predaxa?
ETA: the only medicine I am aware of that I’m allergic to is the antibiotic erythromycin. And I know I’m allergic to that because I took it and suffered an allergic reaction.
a) some medications are combinations of other medications, so you might know that you are allergic to one component of the medication, without having taken the newer, combo drug.
b) some medications are based on (or derived from) similar drugs. My mother is allergic to one type of NSAID, therefore her doctors will not let her take any NSAIDs. Your erythromycin allergy might, at some point, prevent you from being prescribed some other antibiotic that is chemically similar, or known to cause allergic reactions in people who are allergic to erythromycin, etc.
Other than that, it seems like overly cautious legalese.
A verbal torrent of warnings (however nonsensical some seem) was the price prescription drug companies paid to be able to advertise on television. They would much, much rather skip the “Don’t take XYZ if you’re allergic to XYZ” and “Happyista may cause suicidal depression” warnings but they’re required to do it. Apparently it’s working even with the “Digestica may cause bloody intentional implosion” bits since they keep running the ads.
I was in the US recently and once again astounded that the disclaimers went on far, far longer than the “Do you wake up tired in the morning? Try Placebomax! It’s swell!” aspect of the ads.
As sad as it is, there is the “Behind every insultingly obvious warning is a Judgement handed down in a liability case” theory.
I’m inclined to believe it.
I don’t recall seeing the warning in the exact form stated (however, I don’t wish to dispute that it perhaps sometimes or often does) - I’ve only seen it in the form “Don’t take Bullshista if you are allergic to Bullshisticillin”
I have indeed seen it in the exact form stated – “Don’t take [specific drug name] if you are allergic to [specific drug name]” – for several different drugs. The warning goes on to include “any of the ingredients in [specific drug name]” and sometimes related formulations such as you have mentioned.
From a pharmacological standpoint, good points have been made already; your being allergic to Newdrugutin can be reasonably guessed at by your allergies to other similar drugs or compenents of the drug. But the main reason they’re saying it is because the U.S. government forces them to. The rules around what you have to say when advertising a drug are extremely specific.
But these warnings aren’t there because the drug companies’ lawyers want them there as protection. They’re there because US law requires them to be there as a form of consumer protection. If it were up to the drug companies, they’d cover themselves with the insert with the pills or a 3pt font text block in the commercial, not by spending twenty seconds reading scary side effects while a woman happily greets her friends to do yoga in a meadow.
When I was given an antidepressant, nobody told me anything about it, including asking if I was allergic, had had a bad reaction in the past to similar drugs, or anything about the side effects. The only conversation was me telling the guy (who was not even a doctor) I don’t do drugs, only to be told “That’s not drugs. That’s medication.”
The drug companies don’t actually need to list all of the side effects in the ad. They have the option of leaving that out, but only if they also don’t make any claims about what the medication is supposed to do. So you also sometimes see ads that just sort of vaguely suggest what the medication is for without coming right out and saying it, or which just say “Ask your doctor if Bullshista is right for you” without giving you any clue at all. I think the worst offender I’ve seen for this was a clip of someone somehow windsurfing on a field of wheat-- I think that one was for Allegra.
What gets me are the ads for sleep medications that warn you that they “may cause drowsiness.” Isn’t inducing drowsiness the whole point to taking a sleeping pill?
Jeff Foxworthy talks about one of the warnings he and his wife received during childbirth class – “after your wife’s water breaks, do not have sex.”
He theorizes that they wouldn’t tell you that unless somebody had done it: “So just how far apart ARE the contractions, honey? It’d be a shame to waste this semi-private room.”
Some medications not only make you drowsy enough to sleep, they can also impair your wakefulness after you wake up again - 12 or 24 or whatever hours later you still might be prone to napping.
Yup. You don’t want to find yourself suddenly falling asleep behind the wheel of your car or while operating a forklift. And legally, you might be charged with driving while impaired.
