Of Hard Cases…
Everyone knows you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, and you shouldn’t.
Everyone knows you can yell “smoking gun mushroom cloud” on the Tee Vee, but you shouldn’t.
The New England Journal of Medicine examines a somewhat more difficult situation. Can you put Dorothy Hamill on ice skates and sell that drug (one of those that keeps coming up in the comment spam here)?
I go along with some of the opinions expressed in the article: that the best solution is to limit how novel medications are prescribed. Legislation should require the FDA to tailor the rules based on class of med & other pertinent information.
But there is a larger question - how do you protect a gullible public from just plain bad or misleading information (thinking mushroom clouds here - or Carbon is Life) when free speech is so often abused? That’s one that has me scratching my head, hard. Ideas so far are inchoate & there’s no time to go into them. Besides, surely bigger brains than mine have gone to work on them already.
Term limits?