What You Need To Check Before Taking Any Prescription Drug - What Your GP Doesn't Tell You Podcast

Former Canadian Politician Terence Young became a drug safety advocate following the tragic death of his daughter after she had taken the drug Propulsid

The latest episode of What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You - What You Need To Check Before Taking A Prescription Drug is now available on Apple, Spotify and other podcast platforms. And you can sign up to the podcast mailing list at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You, where you can also find out more about the pod.

Former Canadian politician Terence Young, became a drug safety advocate following the tragic death of his 15 year old daughter, Vanessa, after taking the drug Propulsid. The pharmaceutical was taken off the North American market the day before her funeral. In this clip, Young explains what happened the day Vanessa died:

The drug’s manufacturer, Johnson and Johnson agreed to pay 90 million to settle lawsuits that eventually involved claims that 300 people died and as many as 16,000 were injured from taking Propulsid. The company has defended the safety of the drug and said its marketing was appropriate.

The death of his daughter drove Young to become a safety advocate and he set up the non-profit, Drug Safety Canada, to advocate for safer prescription drugs.

And in a new book, Forbidden Knowledge: A Self-Advocate’s Guide to Managing Your Prescription, he argues that it’s essential for us all to educate ourselves about drug safety, we can’t just leave it to doctors.

In the podcast, he talks through the ten key rules or points that we all need to know to become fully informed patients. One issue Young highlights in this extract is that patients given a new drug need to understand that they are actually part of a phase 4 clinical trial, which is not something anyone gets told.

Other facts that Young reveals include why you should avoid - unless there is a very good reason - taking a pharmaceutical less than seven years old; why you should ensure for any medication you take that the benefits outweigh the risks; and how a patient’s individual response to a drug can vary between 400 and 4,000%.

Drug interactions or contraindications are a particular issue because there can be so many foods and other pharmaceuticals that can react adversely with a medication.

Young believes that reforms are needed both within medicine and at government level, but is not optimistic that these will happen any time soon. That’s why he thinks it’s in the interest of safety and patient health for us all individually to become better informed.

Forbidden Knowledge: A Self-Advocate’s Guide to Managing Your Prescription by Terence Young is published by Dundurn  

You can find out more about the podcast at What Your GP Doesn't Tell You and follow me on Twitter @lizctucker.

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