Category Archives: Headline of the Day

when drugs cause the problem they are supposed to prevent

One is bisphosphonates, which is widely used to prevent the fractures, especially of the hip and spine, that are common in people with osteoporosis. Those drugs, like Fosamax, Actonel and Boniva, will now have to carry labels saying they can lead to rare fractures of the thigh bone, a surprising new discovery that came after another surprise — that they can cause a rare degeneration of the jawbone.

The other is Avandia, which is widely prescribed for diabetics, whose disease puts them at risk for heart attacks and heart failure. Two-thirds of diabetics die of heart problems, and a main reason for taking drugs like Avandia is to protect them from that.

Even I did not know the extent of their profit before patient

                           News Advertising & Marketing | Pharma Watch Big Pharma Behaving Badly: A Timeline of Settlements Tuesday October 5th, 2010 Erica Teichert Fierce Pharma Sometimes pharma companies bend the rules. And increasingly,

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Thank heaven for Hearst newspapers -they remember

Healthcare reform has been the focus of coverage – we need more articles like this on medical error.  It is critical for patients, families and addressing needless costs.  http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Year-after-report-patients-still-face-risks-665059.php#page-1

Science should trump belief. But does it?

This is just a great website.  Please take advantage of the enormous work that has gone into providing you, the consumer, with facts, data and science. There is a lot

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OH NO – and we count on journalists!

Are journalists the new target of pharma largesse? Posted on: September 16, 2010; 11:11 am Are the muckrakers moving more slowly than their subjects in the medical field when it

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And under one million there might not be a conflict?

Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device
companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial
connections in journal articles
the following year, according
to a study released Monday.
The study compared major payments to consultants by orthopedic
device companies with financial disclosures the consultants
later made in medical journal
articles, and found them lacking
in public transparency.
“We found a massive, dramatic system failure,” said David J. Rothman, a professor and president
of the Institute on Medicine as a Profession at Columbia University,
who wrote the study with two other Columbia researchers.
The study, published on the Web site of The Archives of Internal
Medicine, focused on 32 medical doctors and doctoral researchers who were each paid at least $1 million in 2007 and published
one or more journal articles the next year. Most of the doctors and most of the orthopedic journal
articles did not disclose their financial relationships with companies,
the study found.
Rothman called for stricter disclosure
policies, including precise amounts of consulting payments. He said journal readers needed the information to consider the potential for bias.
Dr. Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal
of Medicine, who was not involved with the study, called it “an ingenious study, with unsurprising
results. It is one more indication of the widespread corruption
of the medical profession by industry money.”
“The journals’ lax enforcement of disclosure policies probably reflects the fact that journals, too, are dependent on industry support,”
Angell said in an e-mail.
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, responding
to criticism, has proposed
better disclosure policies in the last two years. .
The study does not identify individual
doctors or their articles. Rothman said he did not know how often the journals required disclosures in 2008, but he said the lack of results showed “a broken
system” regardless of who was to blame. DUFF WILSON

CT Cardiologist cares about quality

But Krumholz proved the skeptics wrong. By figuring out what to measure and how, he showed that even top hospitals were systematically underperforming, largely because no one was tracking the results. In 2004 he proved that only one-third of American hospitals were treating heart attack patients quickly enough. His work laid the groundwork for the system the Medicare program now uses to compare hospitals. Another line of research proved that heart-failure patients are frequent flyers: They end up back in the hospital almost as soon as they leave. This result led to a provision in Obama’s new health reform law that will allow Medicare to dock hospitals’ pay starting in 2012 if that revolving door is moving too fast. The new law even creates a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute that aims to extend the type of work Krumholz does in cardiology to other medical arenas such as cancer and psychiatry.

Egregious over prescribing

There is a lot to be upset about in today’s world.  But an article in today’s New York Times is so revealing about the egregious overuse of pharmaceuticals that we

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National Nursing News | The Time is Now: 'Culture of Safety' Key to Preventing Errors

This cry for a culture of safety is just fine – but what about the rest of the systems and people providing care?  National Nursing News | The Time is

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before you swallow that pill

http://www.drugwatch.com/