By Valérie Orsoni — Biohacker & Longevity Expert
Valérie Orsoni is a biohacker, author of 56 books, and founder of biohacker.fr. She has been tracking her biology through N=1 self-experimentation protocols since 1998. She is recently completed her Stanford Genetics Longevity Research certification program and is currently enrolled in the Stanford Medicine nutrition science program. She was named in the Top 50 Longevity Leaders by Life Spanning magazine and is currently the #1 on the Longevity Cup Leaderboard (chronological age -23 years).
Every year, Prescrire, a French medical journal funded exclusively by its subscribers, without a single cent from the pharmaceutical industry, publishes its blacklist of drugs it considers to have an unfavorable risk-to-benefit ratio.
For 2026, 108 drugs made this blacklist, the 14th year in a row.
If you're American and have never heard of Prescrire, that's kind of the point.
There's no real equivalent inside the US government: the FDA's drug review program is partly funded by the industry it regulates, through what are called user fees. The closest thing we have is Public Citizen's Worst Pills, Best Pills, an independent, donor-funded watchdog doing similar work.
Prescrire's list is worth your time precisely because nobody bought a seat at that table.
One important note before we start: in drug safety science, not every risk comes with a clean, single number attached.
Some drugs have been studied in massive cohort studies with precise relative risks. Others only have scattered “reported cases,” with no known denominator, which doesn’t mean the risk is low, only that it hasn’t been publicly quantified yet. I’ll flag this every time rather than inventing a percentage that doesn’t exist.
Being on this list doesn’t mean “stop your treatment immediately.” Stopping abruptly can be more dangerous than the drug itself. It means: ask whoever prescribed it to you why.
But, let me tell you…..fair warning, the numbers are scary.
One very commonly prescribed anti-inflammatory is linked to
major cardiovascular events up 50%,
atrial fibrillation up 20%,
ischemic stroke up 60%,
heart attack up 90%,
and cardiovascular death up 70%.
Another extremely common drug increases bone fractures by 200%.
Yet another, prescribed very casually for digestive issues like nausea, is linked to an estimated 200 sudden deaths a year in France alone.
You probably don’t know what’s coming in this list and believe me, you will be shocked!