A pharmacist at Whalen's Drug Store, 55 E 42nd Street, is shown putting up a sign advertising the fact that they now have the wonder drug, penicillin, in stock. However, New Yorkers soon learned that the potent germ killer cannot be bought across the counter like liver pills but only by prescription and that it must be administered by a physician. (March 1945 — via Getty Images)

FDA sur­vey finds Amer­i­cans don’t re­al­ly un­der­stand drug ap­provals

On­ly 25% of Amer­i­cans un­der­stand that a new drug ap­proved by the FDA does not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean the drug will help most peo­ple who use it, ac­cord­ing to the re­sults of a sur­vey con­duct­ed in 2017 and pub­lished last week in Phar­ma­coepi­demi­ol­o­gy & Drug Safe­ty.

How­ev­er, FDA’s sur­vey of a na­tion­al­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive group of 1,744 US adults did find that more than half un­der­stood that the reg­u­la­tor ap­proves pre­scrip­tion drugs when the drug of­fers ben­e­fits that out­weigh the risks, al­though 17.5% thought that an FDA-ap­proved drug will cure the con­di­tion for which it’s pre­scribed.

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