www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20041228.shtml
In the midst of all the alarms being sounded about the health risks from taking Vioxx and Celebrex, there is a story about National Football Lea gue players using less padding than in the past. The NFL players know that padding gives some protection against injuries -- but at a price. Carrying the extra weight of padding around slows pla yers down, making them less effective on the football field and perhaps less able to quickly get out of the way of tackles and collisions. In sh ort, they understand that safety is not a free lunch but something you h ave to pay for, in one way or another. Most players wear some padding, just not as much as they are allowed to, or as much as their teams make available to them. In short, NFL players recognize a trade-off, as most other people do in most other aspects of life. That's where they make unrealistic demands, includin g demands for "safety." Maybe Vioxx or Celebrex is too dangerous, all things considered. Too many people seem to think that if the risk of stroke or heart attack is doubled when you take some medication, that is the end of the story. But they would never apply such reasoning to practical decisions in the ir own lives. Suppose you learned that the risk of being killed in an automobile accid ent doubled if you drove to work on the highway instead of driving throu gh the city streets. What if the odds that you would be killed driving t o work every day on the highway were one in a million, while the risk of being killed driving to work on the streets were one in two million? And what if it took you 15 minutes to get to work on the highway and an hour driving through city traffic? Some cautious people might prefer driving to work on the streets while o ther people would take the highway. Regardless of which group was larger , the point is that each individual could make the trade-offs when the f acts were known. But that is not the way decisions are made, or even adv ocated, when there are "safety" issues, including issues about drugs lik e Vioxx and Celebrex. Studies indicate that the great majority of people taking even heavy dos es of these drugs over an extended period of time did not have either a stroke or a heart attack. However, the small number of people who did wa s greater than among those who did not take these drugs. Obviously people would not be taking these or other medications unless t hey had a problem that these drugs were intended to help. The question t hen is whether the benefits exceed the costs or vice-versa. This is a medical decision which can vary from patient to patient. Docto rs are there to advise about these things, since these are prescription drugs -- not something that a layman can pick up off a counter at the lo cal drugstore. But that is not good enough for "safety" advocates, many of whom have no medical training. If a drug is not "safe," they say it should not be al lowed on the market. Some people can die from eating ordinary wholesome foods like salmon or peanut butter. If the government banned every food that was fatal to som eone, we might all die of malnutrition. If a drug is not safe, neither is the illness for which the drug is pres cribed. Nor are alternative drugs likely to be perfectly safe, since not hing else is. Life involves weighing alternative risks, whether in footb all, pharmaceutical drugs, or a thousand other things. Politically, it is always easy to be on the side of the angels with ring ing pronouncements about making sure our medicines are safe. Ideologues are in their glory denouncing "corporate greed" among drug companies. Maybe we need to cure ourselves of listening to rhetoric and ignoring re alities.
Applied Economics So much of our national political debate these days revolves around econo mic matters -- taxes, health care, even affirmative action and immigrati on policy -- that it is essential for every informed American to have a working knowledge of economics. Now the renowned conservative economist Thomas Sowell has made it possible for you to grasp quickly and easily t he economic elements of key public policies -- even if economics has alw ays seemed dry and forbidding in the past.
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