Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K)

The safety and efficacy profiles of medications, generally speaking, after they get widely used, the efficacy goes down and the safety risks actually get worse.

So I'll give you all just a couple of examples.

So thalidomide was a great anti-nausea drug that we used for cancer treatment.

Awesome, looked wonderful, things like that.

People started taking thalidomide when they had cancer and then it worked really well.

So then some doctors were like, oh, cool, like this is such a powerful nausea drug.

You know what other group of people?

gets nauseous a lot?

Pregnant women.

So we started giving thalidomide to pregnant ladies.

And guess what happened?

They started giving birth to children without arms or legs.

Like legit, that's not an exaggeration.

I'm not using this for clickbait.

That's like literally what happened.

So it is a huge teratogen, really, really dangerous.

Now thalidomide is not available on the market anymore because of safety concerns.

We see that a lot with other kinds of medications as well.

So another good example of this is antidepressants.

The efficacy of antidepressants is probably way less than we originally thought.