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Not nearly as well as you might have been led to believe:
Even the best drugs have imperfect chances of working for any one person. Asthma drugs work in about 60 percent of patients. Migraine drugs are effective in only about half of cases. Drugs for Alzheimer’s disease work in about 30 percent of patients. And those are exceptional results compared to cancer drugs, which at best work about 25 percent of the time.
And:
It’s been said, though, that had Bayer compounded the first stable form of aspirin yesterday, rather than 110 years ago, it would never get FDA approval. The problem is twofold: For one, aspirin doesn’t really work like a magic “bullet” at all; it’s more like a shotgun, having scattered effects on many different systems within the body. This is contrary to the current industry preference for drugs that work like bullets, hitting single, precise targets. And second, aspirin has long been known to come with side effects. It can cause serious gastric bleeding in some people, and it can cause Reye’s syndrome, a potentially fatal neurological disease, in children. These side effects would be red flags to today’s drug developers.
And:
…acetaminophen (Tylenol) can be a profoundly dangerous drug. For some people, it is pure poison. Acetaminophen is the most common cause of liver failure in the United States, where about 50 percent of cases are attributed to acetaminophen toxicity, according to a 2005 study.
This is all from a new piece in The Atlantic which is interesting (or to be more accurate, terrifying) throughout.
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