Marketing Suicide by Misapplying Population Trends_No Competing Interests?
Suicide rates fluctuate. Like the stock market their rise and fall is not due to a single decisive cause, but rather to a confluence of complex factors.
NYT Editorial: Safe Drug Testing in Prisons?
An editorial in today's New York Times is a follow-up to its riveting report by Ian Urbina on the recommendation by an Institute of Medicine panel to
lift 1978 federal restrictions on medical experiments on prisoners. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/us/13inmates.html?
Lift Veil on Research Funding
A Boston Globe report (below) focuses on three recent reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by Harvard researchers who violated the journal’s disclosure policy by failing to disclose their financial ties to companies that had the most to gain from their purported findings.
OIG Report: FDA Fails to Monitor Adverse Safety Reports_BMJ–FDA Duplicity Exposed
Every federal oversight agency evaluating FDA’s safety performance has given the agency flunking grades. See:https://ahrp.org/cms/content/view/148/55/
A Cure for Public Distrust: Journals Must Exercise Their Authority as Gatekeeper
The Times’ humorous profile of JAMA’s editor attempts to trivialize the threat to public health when journals fail to maintain the integrity of science-based medicine.
Journals Must Exercise Their Authority as Gatekeepers
The harm done by journals’ failure to protect the integrity of science can hardly be overstated.
Child Born with Severe Heart Birth Defects–Paxil Lawsuit Filed
The law firm of Baum Hedlund filed a lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline, the maker of the antidepressant, Paxil, for causing severe heart defects in the newborn son, of a woman prescribed Paxil during her pregnancy.
Three Essays: Ethics Medico-Industrial Complex
Three essays provide an overview of the bias that has debased the integrity of medical research literature while increasing the hazards of medical practice–for patients and doctors who are kept in the dark about prescribed treatment dangers.
Did regulators fail over SSRIs? BMJ
Dr. David Healy, a formidable critic of the iron grip pharmaceutical corporations wield on the practice of psychiatry as well as on psychiatry’s deficient journal reports, directs his criticism at drug regulators in an article in the current British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Can We Tame the Monster?
"Drug companies should not be allowed to evaluate their own products."
Cardiologists Revolut RE: Industtry’s Role in Expanding Definition of Hypertension_NYT
A front page article in The New York Times gives a ray of hope about reclaiming medicine from the clutches of industry and its single-minded profit-driven goals:
Science’s Gatekeepers, a Credibility Gap_Dr. Lawrence Altman,
"Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited." NYT