>>I guess it depends on how much you want to live. I've been fighting for my survival for a long time. How far I would be willing to go.....I won't really know until it comes time to make that decision. I do know I have a lot to live for.
>>
>>How about you? Given a choice to die or to live as a blind person, do you have any idea what your decision would be.
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>>Too many aspirin can kill you.
>
>While I think the drug companies should be compelled to make warnings stronger and update them as new information is brought to light, I basically side with you in this regards:
>- As a drug gets wider/longer use - even in "off label" prescriptions by doctors themselves - more and more side-effects are bound to come to light. It's always very difficult to know how my own make-up is compared to the more 'difficult' side-effects reported - will I see them or not????
>I'm inclined to be watchful any time I start something new.
>In fact I just had an 'incident' where my hemoglobin went down badly, and in the course of preparing for a diagnostic test (a 3 days prep of limited eating and certain pills banned) the condition rversed itself. I blame it on a pill I started 5 months ago, but who knows!?!?
>I also prefer to ask the doctor how long a pill has been on the market and if there's some pill roughly the equivalent that has been around a long long time. Often I get a yes and the alternate pill.
>
>It's a tough call. some getting blind surely doesn't mean everyone getting blind. But warnings MUST be there and self-watching important in such cases.
>

Let me preface this by saying my respect for and trust of the big pharmaceuticals is nil. It is not difficult at all to believe they might choose profit over public safety. But on the point of regulation, they are already regulated up to their eyeballs. You have surely noticed all the TV, radio, and magazine ads for new medications with weird names. ("Ask your doctor!" most of them say. I bet doctors love that). In the magazines the ads always appear on the right hand page, with the backing pages filled with disclaimers, warnings, and other assorted small print required by the FDA. So they have to pay for two pages of ad space to try to grab our eyeballs. The pharmas are slippery as hell but I wouldn't call them unregulated. The cost of regulating them beyond the shadow of a doubt would be prohibitive, and in fact would be socialism.