Well, good afternoon everyone from the west coast.
My hands are in rough shape, but I am beginning to wonder if it is
a side effect of the drug I am taking, rather than the RA itself.
‘What’s the NNT?’
First, a patient should ask the doctor about a statistic called the nnt,
or the “Number-Needed-to-Treat.”
The nnt is a piece of data doctors and pharmaceutical companies generally don’t like to discuss.
It describes the number of people who need to take a certain drug in order for
one of them
to be helped by it. Consider the example of statin. Statin is a class of drug routinely prescribed
to lower patients’ cholesterol levels.
But the nnt for the most widely prescribed statin is a jaw-dropping 250.
That means for every 250 people taking it, statin helps only
one person.
Statin has an unusually high nnt, but GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of
all prescription drugs work for only
30 to 50 percent of people taking them.
And in many cases, the effects of your medications are far worse than neutral.
That leads to the second question a patient should ask.
‘What Are the Side Effects?’
read more here, a good artical
https://www.thetrumpet.com/article/13299.18.0.0/society/should-you-take-the-recommended-meds