by Alison Bass | Sep 10, 2012 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, drug marketing, health care costs, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug overdoes, public health
Did you know that West Virginia has the second highest rate of deaths from prescription drug overdoses in the country? I didn’t, until I moved to the Mountain State to live and work and became curious as to what was behind this tragic statistic. According to a...
by Alison Bass | Apr 27, 2012 | antidepressants, biotech industry, clinical trials, continuing medical education, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, medical devices, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct, suicide rates, Uncategorized
Is the Food and Drug Administration violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? That was the question that Donald Light, co-author of The Risk for Prescription Drugs and a long-time medical sociologist, posed at a talk yesterday at Brandeis University. The...
by Alison Bass | Apr 12, 2012 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct
I’ve been reading Dr. David Healy’s new book, Pharmageddon, and while some of it may seem like old news, I was struck by his fresh analysis of how the pharmaceutical industry has turned the original purpose of clinical trials inside out. As Healy, a noted...
by Alison Bass | Feb 20, 2012 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, health care costs, pharmaceutical industry
When Dr. Irving Kirsch published his meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine in February 2008 showing that antidepressants were no more effective than a placebo in treating mild or moderate depression, the national news media ignored his explosive findings, for the most part....
by Alison Bass | Sep 30, 2011 | health care costs, university industry collaboration
The current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains a thoughtful essay about who owns federally funded research: the universities who receive the funding or the private companies who contract with academic researchers to develop a specific innovation for...
by Alison Bass | Sep 23, 2011 | conflicts of interest, health care costs
At a Harvard event last night honoring the former Grassley investigator Paul Thacker, someone in the audience wanted to know how the topic of Thacker’s talk — Dollars for Doctors: Who owns your physician? — was related to the soaring cost of medical...
