Benefits of New Medications

Patients are not the only group to have become more concerned about
the quality of life that results from medical interventions. The interest of
health researchers, policy makers, and administrators predates the public’s
by at least a decade. Beginning in the 1960s, a variety of medications
were developed to increase patients’ functioning or to lessen their pain,
discomfort, depression, or anxiety without curing their diseases or increasing
their prospects for survival. In order to assess the benefits of
these new medications, the pharmaceutical industry financed the design
and use of some of the earliest quantitative measures of quality of
life. That industry continues to play a major role in developing and utilizing
increasingly sophisticated quality-of-life measures (Walker, 1993;
Spilker, 1996). In the past thirty years, quality-of-life measurement has
been eagerly taken up by researchers, epidemiologists, public and private
health administrators, health economists, and health policy makers.1
Together with estimates of survival and tests of physiological function,
these measures have now become a standard part of the calculus employed
to compare the “cost-effectiveness” of treatments for the same
and different health conditions, a calculus that is used to justify tradeoffs
among limited medical resource