The excitement over ketamine, a drug that has been available for decades, mirrors a new analysis of medication effectiveness. The researchers found that older drugs outperform the newest arrivals in many cases, especially when the drugs are compared to placebo controls.
Despite tens of billions of dollars devoted to research and development, pharmaceutical companies have not come up with many breakthroughs in the last decade. Most of the real pharmaceutical advances happened years ago. Huge consolidation within the industry was supposed to bring efficiency to the drug discovery process, but the analysis shows that, for the most part, newer drugs are vastly more expensive but not necessarily better than old standbys.
