Well that is easy to explain. When a pharmaceutical company develops a new drug they must follow the guidelines of the FDA. That insures proper testing including side effects and withdrawal. This process usually takes an easy 7 to 10 years and at a cost of millions of dollars. Once completed all the results are supplied to the FDA for their approval for a specific purpose. FDA takes around 6 months to 2 years to review the results and make a decision. The FDA does NOT verify the results are true only that proper scientific procedure was performed. Once approved it then becomes available in the market place. Due to the incredible expense the FDA does not and can not afford to do their own testing.
In the case of Cymbalta the original testing results showed a withdrawal with flu like symptoms for 7 to 14 days. Well ot did not take long for people to start complaining, lawsuits were filed, years in court and finally the court made a decision. Withdrawal is real and can be severe. They ordered Cymbalta to put a warning on there drug insert that comes with the medicine. They also required the FDA to post a black box warning on their website. Both of which were done several years ago. The court did NOT order that the drs should be notified (a very difficult task). They expect the drs to keep up with all the current medical information.
On the flip side the FDA has tens of thousands of pages on prescription medication as well as over 300 medical research articles published each week. NO dr can keep up with that. So where does that leave us? We have to be our own health experts. In my case anytime a dr writes a prescription for a new drug or recommends anew procedure I ALWAYS say I will look into it. I do extensive research in the medical journals and look into the professional websites (Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, etc) and then make my decision. Any information that I find that is different than what my dr stated is printed off and sent or taken to my dr. If he does not want to read ot or discuss it than I find a new dr.
On this website we realize the pressure and burden this puts on patients so we often will help with the research and dig for information that they can use as well as their dr.