This weekly column offers opinions on the latest pharmaceutical industry news.

Imagine being prescribed a medicine when neither your doctor nor the manufacturer has any clue whether it will actually work — because the government never required it to be tested for effectiveness.

That’s not how things are done now, because federal law requires drugs to undergo clinical trial testing to gauge benefits and risks. But the incoming Trump administration may seek to undo a decades-old standard of evaluating drugs for effectiveness — to the detriment of every American who takes a prescription medicine.