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.

It is up to us – the growning patient safety movement

Slowly the public is coming to realize that hospitals are not always safe places. When the Institute of Medicine published its landmark study “To Err Is Human” a decade ago, pointing out the ubiquitous problem of medical errors in the U.S., the press yawned. Since then, though, a grassroots patient safety movement has blossomed, and the media’s interest has grown along with it. More journalists are using data and old-fashioned shoe leather reporting to dig into what’s killing Americans in places that are supposed to make them well

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/

What a resource for the consumer.

http://www.gooznews.com/ you have to check out this website.  There has been so much news recently of drugs being pulled off the market, Harvard redefining it conflict of interest policy and so

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Risky Business: How TV drug ads should talk about risk

We have joined with others – demanding greater transparency and accountability How clear does risk information need to be in direct-to-consumer drug ads? That’s the question the FDA is getting

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They keep silent – that in itself is negligence

[Jul 14, 2010] The Associated Press: “Your doctor could be drunk, addicted to drugs or outright incompetent, but other physicians may not blow the whistle. A new survey finds that

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