To get approval from the Food and Drug Administration, drugs must be proved both effective and safe. But the F.D.A.’s bar, while meaningful, often isn’t very useful for what physicians and patients really care about every day: how effective and safe drugs are compared with one another. We don’t know. What are the relative trade-offs between benefits and side effects in different patients in different circumstances? We don’t know.

Source: New York Times August 20, 2018 09:00 UTC