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269. Bad Medicine, Part 2: (Drug) Trials and Tribulations

Freakonomics Radio

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How Can a Drug That Lowers Blood Sugar Help Diabetes?

Many of the drugs recently approved by the fda to treat diabedes l those drugs have been approved on to the market with only evidence showing that they improve your blood sugar. None of them have got evidence showing thatthey reduce your risk of heart attack or renal failure or eye problems, or any of the actual real stuff that patients with diabetes care about. Since all of those outcomes would be horrid to test for in a clinical trial, and by hard really mean as time consuming and expensive. Instead, the researches go for the simple surrgate outcome of whether their pill lowers blood sugar. But actually it's not correlated as well as you might hope. And the history of medicine

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