Peter Huber on Better Medicine

The vital core of medicine is now on the same
plummeting-cost trajectory as microchips and software, says Peter
Huber. But the Food and Drug Administration rules that govern the
rollout of 21st-century drugs were designed for the far less
powerful 20th-century tools of pharmacology. The regulations were
cobbled together at a time when nobody could read the
molecular-scale code that controls so much of health and disease.
Drugs were designed mainly by hunches and guesswork, and very few
worked well. The safe and effective use of medicine depended on
gathering purely statistical information about how drugs affect
high-level clinical symptoms.

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