Doctors Without Borders: Why you can’t trust medical journals anymore Tue, 13 Apr 2004 Related link: Hear an interview with Shannon Brownlee on NPR at: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1874563 Doctors Without Borders in the Washington Monthly (excerpt below), looks at the intricate web of collaborating players in medicine who are financially tied one…
August 26, 2002 OHRP Retreats from Providing Public Info re: Compliance Activities FYI A newly posted announcement by the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP), dated July 15, rescinds the agency’s announced policy of making public the content of its letters of determination following the agency’s investigation of compliance /…
FDA Standards – Good Enough for Government Work? Fri, 23 Sep 2005 An essay in The New England Journal of Medicine, by Jerry Avorn, M.D., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, chalolenges FDA’s “minimalist” drug…
July 12, 2002 Babies Exposed to Toxic Vaccines FYI Several recent articles focus on unsafe vaccines: ABC News reports (below) that 3,400 people, half of them children, “received the questionable vaccines from Park Nicollet Clinic in the Minneapolis metropolitan area. The vaccines included polio booster shots, hepatitis A and B…
Federal Study Finds No Benefit of New Antipsychotic Drugs – WashPost/Wall StreetJ/NY Times Tue, 20 Sep 2005 The findings of a $44 million government sponsored study, CATIE, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, comparing an older generic antipsychotic to four new atypical antipsychotics, undercut the legitimacy of psychiatry’s…
Doctor calls President’s mental health Screening Initiative “Crazy” – UPI Thu, 23 Dec 2004 Dr. Jane Orient, the Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, has written a brilliant, clear-eyed blistering commentary–Are Your Children Crazy? America’s 52 million school children and 6 million staff are the first…
Hormone Replacement “Bombshell” is Not and isolated incident Wednesday, July 10, 2002 Until a “bombshell” study overturned hormone replacement treatment (HRT), Premarin was the most prescribed drug in U.S. in the last decade (45 million Rx in 2001) and Prempro the most prescribed estrongen / progesterone combination (22 million Rx…
Lilly to Add Suicide Warning to Strattera – Medicaid May shrink $5.5 Billion spending on Schizophrenia Drug Thu, 29 Sep 2005 Reuters reports that Eli Lilly is adding a Black Box suicide warning to the Strattera label. Strattera has been promoted as a “non stimulant” treatment for ADHD. Since ADHD…
Calls Mounting for FDA Revamp / Americans Are the most medicated population in the world – DHHS Sun, 26 Dec 2004 A government survey by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, confirms that Americans are the most medicated population in the world – 44 percent of Americans had…
Duke Survey Clinical trials: Research Conflicts of Interest Violate ethical Guidelines_UPI Sun, 27 Oct 2002 A major Duke University survey of 108 U.S. medical schools reveals that medical institutions fail utterly to meet international standards aimed at ensuring the integrity of clinical research and the safety of the subjects. Conflicts…
When Doctors Learn, Drug Firms Often Pay th eTab – Philly Inquirer Wed, 8 Jun 2005 The Philadelphia Inquirer reports about the blinders that academic medical institutions and physicians (in this instance psychiatrists) put on pretending not to know that they have surrendered the integrity of medicine and medical education…
NIH: Public Servant or Private Marketer? Wed, 22 Dec 2004 David Willman of the Los Angeles Times provides an important reminder that the FDA is not the only government healthcare agency to have betrayed the public trust and lost its credibility. While the FDA has lent its seal of approval…
