Back in 2006, I worked at Public Citizen with Sidney Wolfe and the Attorney General of Illinois to petition the FDA to place a black box warning on all fluoroquinolone antibiotics warning of the dangers of tendon ruptures. A typical case would be an otherwise healthy person taking, say, Levaquin, for the past 24 hours doing something normal like sitting up from a chair and one of their achilles tendons would snap. It’s a very odd side effect of these drugs that include Levaquin and Cipro.

Our petition to the FDA was successful. Now there is a warning on all of these drugs. Of course, now that there is a warning, there are legal hawks advertising everywhere soliciting patient/customers to sue the drug makers.

It’s odd how you can make the world a safer place and, at the same time, create an entirely new industry to make the hawkish lawyers millions and actually cost the system more money.

My work with Public Citizen created an entire industry of malpractice law.