Limitations of Adverse Effects Reporting
In principle, medical professionals are required to report all adverse effects related to a specific form of therapy. In practice, it is at the discretion of the professional to determine whether a medical event is at all related to the therapy. For example, a leg fracture in a skiing accident in a patient who years before took antibiotics for pneumonia is not likely to get reported.
As a result, routine adverse effects reporting often may not include long-term and subtle effects that may ultimately be attributed to a therapy.
Part of the difficulty is identifying the source of a complaint. A headache in a patient taking medication for influenza may be caused by the underlying disease or may be an adverse effect of the treatment. In patients with end-stage cancer, death is a very likely outcome and whether the drug is the cause or a bystander is often difficult to discern.
Read more about this topic: Adverse Effect
Famous quotes containing the words limitations of, limitations, adverse, effects and/or reporting:
“The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“That all may be so, but when I begin to exercise that power I am not conscious of the power, but only of the limitations imposed on me.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“[Religious establishment] is adverse to the diffusion of the light of Christianity ... [because] with an ignoble and unchristian timidity it would [be] circumscribed, with a wall of defence, against the encroachments of error.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewelry or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us . . .”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.”
—Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)