Last night, I was talking to a friend, and saying, regarding health care, that very often we had simply no idea what various drugs were doing to us. But that those who prescribed them (from my firsthand experience) had the arrogance to assume we knew everything about them.

The human body is tremendously complex. We're still only starting to know what's going on in there. While we may be able to know what some drug does in one area, we're not really assured it has no effects in any other areas, it would seem to kme.

Today's "Wait, we were wrong" pertains to common asthma drugs. Turns out, over time, they make the condition worse, not better. Whoops!

In the short-term, the drugs have an immediate effect. But some studies have shown long-term daily use can make the drugs less effective. It had been thought that this was because the body became desensitised to the effect of the drug. But the US researchers say the body actually becomes over-sensitive to asthma triggers if the drugs are used long-term... This process makes the airways highly sensitive to asthma triggers.

Yet, bizzarely:

"This should cause no concern to those with asthma as a significant loss of effectiveness of treatment has not been demonstrated in these studies."