The Common Drug Review is part of the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health. It is a national program that determines what drugs are worth putting on formularies in the province. They decided that Lyrica should not be used just because a comparison with amitriptyline was not forthcoming. I wrote them this letter:
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Re decisions made: Decisions made by your organization would NOT stand ethics board analysis. For example Lyrica is delisted because there has been no adequate comparison with Amitriptyline. This, however, does not claim it is not effective particularly in patients unable to tolerate amitriptyline. Nonetheless, I have had acute herpes zoster elderly subjects unable to tolerate other agents (amitriptyline and other TCA’s and gabapentin) decide to go off lyrica once my samples depleted and live in relative agony. I would suggest your organization be disbanded as provincial formularies will use your conclusions to their advantage without taking intolerances to other agents in mind. The bare minimum you would need is ethics board approval of your recommendations. Shame on you – what would you do if your grandmother developed shingles and was in so much pain, unable to tolerate gabapentin and tricyclics? Yours disgusted, I am sure their decisions are all scientifically based. I am reading a Book Called Contemplative Science by B. Alan Wallace. In it he states: “It is sobering to note that the twentieth century, which generated the greatest growth of scientific knowledge in the entire course of human history, also witnessed man’s greatest inhumanity to man, as well as the greatest degradation of our natural environment and the decimation of other species. The expansion of scientific knowledge has not brought about any comparable growth in ethics or virtue.”
It is disgusting that we are paying a government agency to be soul-lessly scientific and immoral.
Make your own views known
site:
http://cadth.ca/index.php/en/cdr/cdr-overview
just use contact us at the top.
I have a picture that portrays my view of fear-avoidance:My perspective is that, in a good many of cases, everything is controlled by pain intensity. Some articles try to avoid the issue by saying “they just thought they were in a lot of pain” and that in itself was a psychological problem (oh brother).
