I suppose that’s progress: “Patient-driven drug development is morally permissible”!

This is one of those funny moments in a social movement. A few weeks ago the first email in my inbox was a Google Scholar notification saying that one of my BMJ articles had been cited in a new book, Philosophical Issues in Pharmaceutics. Yay!

The details, though, are amusing to an activist. The opening essay is titled Patient-Driven Drug Development, and in the abstract the author says “In this essay I argue that patient-driven drug development is morally permissible.”

At first I thought “How nice of them to say it’s morally permissible to listen to patient perspectives,” and I snarked about it on the BMJ Patient Advisor email group.  But then Amy Price PhD, a researcher/patient at Oxford, noted that this actually is real progress: it means people in industry are actively looking at questions like this, and things are starting to move forward.

So, hurray! It’s more significant than I thought. Here’s to progress, and here’s to more of it!