SGEM Xtra: Tell Me Lies, Sweet Little Lies – FDA Approved & Ineffective

Date: August 12, 2025 Article: FDA Approved and Ineffective by Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee. June 5, 2025. The Lever. Jeanne Lenzer Guest Skeptic: Jeanne Lenzer is a long-time medical investigative journalist and returning SGEM guest. Her previous work, including the book The Danger Within Us, explored how conflicts of interest and weak evidence can endanger patient care. In this new project with The Lever, Jeanne analyzes how the FDA approves drugs that often don’t meet basic efficacy standards. I think many people assume that if a treatment is FDA-approved, surely it must work. However, people may be shocked to find out about the FDA’s drug approval process and how ineffective or harmful medications make it to market. Most patients and doctors have no idea that the FDA has quietly flipped the drug approval process on its head by putting most drugs on the market before they are shown to be safe or effective, with the promise that they will do those studies after they are on the market. Studies have shown that once a drug is on the market, patients do not want to enter or remain in clinical trials because they are convinced they’re being deprived of a proven treatment, and failure to enroll sufficient patients is one reason postmarket studies are delayed or never conducted. Once a drug is on the market, the FDA can require postmarket testing, but the due dates are often set so many years in the future that the patent will have run out. Take the controversial new Alzheimer’s drug, Leqembi, which causes brain bleeds, swelling and death. The manufacturer is required to conduct safety studies and report annually to the FDA.  However, neither the FDA nor the company will release the safety data until the final report is due. This will be in 2036, 13 years after it’s been on the market. This can be considered a guaranteed win for Pharma and a bad deal for patients. The FDA has fallen so low that the agency introduced a new term, “dangling approvals” for drugs approved before clinical benefit was proved and then allowed to remain on the market even after the post-marketing studies fail. Richard Pazdur, head of oncology at the FDA, defended the agency’s refusal to order certain cancer drugs off the market even after their post-market studies failed, saying “A failed trial, doesn’t mean a failed drug.” Well, true and true, but the idea is that drugs were supposed to be proven to work before they go on the market, not after. And with Pazdur’s and the FDA’s reasoning, any bad drug could remain on the market forever. And a few have. A two-year investigation by Lenzer and Brownlee found 429 FDA approvals (2013–2022) where the majority of drugs were authorized on inadequate evidence of effectiveness, with heavy reliance on surrogate outcomes, frequent lack of replication, and slow/absent confirmatory trials. The highlighted real-world harm and cost and call for regulators and clinicians to re-center on patient-oriented outcomes (POO) before widespread adoption. The article gives a few stories about FDA-approved drugs that turned out to cause harm without any benefit. One example was the drug Elmiron: Elmiron (pentosan polysulfate sodium) was approved in 1996 by the FDA for interstitial cystitis (chronic bladder pain) FDA approval was given without solid evidence of effectiveness FDA allowed approval on the condition that a follow-up study be done to confirm efficacy The follow-up study took 18 years to complete and showed no benefit over placebo Despite this, Elmiron remained on the market Not just a lack of benefit, but there were reported cases of harm Elmiron was associated with cases of a rare eye disease called pigmentary maculopathy that resulted in vision loss or blindness. It was also associated with severe colitis and dozens of deaths Bottom line is a drug with no proven benefit and significant harms stayed on the market for nearly 30 years