blog.bioethics.net
a Nature Top 50 science blog from The American Journal of Bioethics
Entries from blog.bioethics.net tagged with 'pharmaceuticals'
Keeping Your Skin Youthful, The Stem Cell Way
Stem cells are, apparently, all the rage in the world of cosmetics. Slather them on your face to keep your face young and ageless or to simply make yourself more beautiful on your eyes, cheeks, or lips. New products like Lancôme's Absolue Precious Cells claim to "help restore the potential... (read the rest)
Lose Your Job, Keep Your Drugs
According to Judith Graham at the Chicago Tribune's Triage blog, Pfizer has created a new program to allow the unemployed--and thus uninsured--to keep access to their prescription drugs for one year. The cynics will say, of course, that the program is designed to keep brand loyalty for patients while they... (read the rest)
Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal
It's a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired. The Scientist... (read the rest)
Direct-to-Consumer Ads Fail to Direct Many Consumers
According to MSNBC, direct-to-consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals are cluttering the airwaves with offers to cure Americans of their bipolar disorder, irritable bowel disease, sleeplessness, acid reflux, high cholesterol and more. However, when these Americans who are bombarded by magazine and television ads go into see their doctor, only a tiny... (read the rest)
Jumping on the Conflict of Interest Bandwagon
After the Cleveland Clinic announced last week that it would disclose all of its physician's financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, other hospitals are following suit as not to be left behind on the ethics bandwagon. Just 2 days after the Clinic's announcement, Penn Medicine has announced that they too will... (read the rest)
Crestor for All?
It turns out that not just the high cholesterol crowd benefits from the use of anti-cholesterol medications, in this case Crestor, says Bloomberg. Recent studies have shown that the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death is cut almost by half by the use of these drugs by those well... (read the rest)
Love Pharma, Get a Free TV Spot
The pharmaceutical industry is saying a big "THANK YOU" to its favorite politicians by promoting them in television ads, says the Wall Street Journal Health Blog . Thanks to the watchdogs at the Center for Public Integrity, we now know that more than $13 million has been spent to praise... (read the rest)
deCODE demoted
I have something to tell you about deCODE--there's good news and there's bad news. First, for the good news: today deCODE announced that it has filed an IND with the FDA for a new drug on cognition designed to combat memory loss and the other effects of Alzheimer's disease. The... (read the rest)
Good Morning, Sunshine?
Some companies in the pharmaceutical industry are patting itself on the back for its self-mandated reporting of speaker fees and consultancies to docs. Eli Lilly led the charge, followed by Merck, according to the NYT. With certainty, the other pharma titans will jump on the bandwagon in no time. My... (read the rest)
No to Pens and Yes to Pizza
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Board of Directors have adopted a new code of ethics on interactions with healthcare professionals (bioethics.net News, July 12, 2008). This change in the code would further restrict pharmaceutical reps and other industry professionals in regard to their interactions with doctors, nurses,... (read the rest)
Accepting placebos
Over at the Neuroethics and Law Blog, Adam Kolber argues that we should embrace the use of placebos: Should a doctor stop prescribing antidepressants to a particular patient when the doctor believes that antidepressants will be no better for the patient than placebos? After recent changes in the American Medical... (read the rest)
Out with them, out with them all!
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that a health care group got an early jump on Spring cleaning: Administrators at SMDC Health System saw them as virulent, insidious and cause for an all-out eradication campaign in its four hospitals and 17 clinics throughout northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Germs? No, pens and... (read the rest)
Zetia situation demonstrates need for a more open clinical trial process
By Alan C. Milstein The news about Zetia and Vytorin once again raises a major problem in the way the FDA allows drug companies to control the information about the clinical trials they conduct, often to the detriment to public health. Apparently, Merck and Schering-Plough had completed the trial which... (read the rest)
One more time -- should docs take freebies from drug companies?
By James Fossett In an article in the most recent New England Journal of Medicine, Eric Campbell has some new data on an old question -- how many doctors take things from drug companies and what effects does taking things have on prescribing patterns? (free access). Campbell reports these connections... (read the rest)
OK, who hasn't taken money from drug companies?
Via Jim Fossett comes word of a paper in the October 17 JAMA reporting that 60 percent of respondents to a survey of medical school department chairs indicated they had some form of personal relationship with industry -- either as a consultant, a member of a scientific advisory board, a... (read the rest)
Networking with Pfizer
Online social networking sites are all the rage these days, so it was only a matter of time before there was one for doctors -- and that's what Sermo is aiming to be. The site decribes itself thusly: Here, physicians aggregate observations from their daily practice and then - rapidly... (read the rest)
Days of styrofoam cups and M&Ms
Via Jim Fossett (and Bioethics News) comes this NYT story about how a Minnesota law limiting gifts to doctors has affected drug reps there. It seems some of the glamour is gone: Two years after Minnesota officials forbade drug makers to give doctors more than $50 worth of food or... (read the rest)
Weekend reading
The Smart Set: How to live forever Jason Wilson travels to a remote part of Sardinia to find out why the area has so many centenarians. Along the way he finds sniping researchers, ambivalent old people and more questions than answers: So if I'm the kind of person who's keen... (read the rest)
Following up: vCJD and donated sperm, HPV vaccine
Here are a few updates and extensions to recent posts on blog.bioethics.net: Imported sperm shortage After everyone seemed to have a good laugh about the ban on imports of donated Scandinavian sperm, Slate's Explainer took up the question of whether donated sperm could transmit vCJD. The Explainer's conclusion: probably not.... (read the rest)
About medical publishing and advertising
The web delivered a bit of a serendipitous dialectic today on the subject of how medical journals pay the bills. This morning, the New York Times published a story about the launch of OncologySTAT, Reed Elsevier's new ad-supported portal for cancer research. The publisher's plan basically goes like this: 1.... (read the rest)
Weekend reading
NYT: A Drug Maker's Views of What Ails Health Care Via Art Caplan comes this interview with the chief executive of Novartis: Q. Is the pharmaceutical industry part of the cure or part of the problem? A. If you look at the mortality rates from hypertensive heart disease or stroke... (read the rest)
Setback for terminally ill patients seeking experimental drugs
By Alicia Ouellette The Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs suffered a major (and perhaps fatal) setback in its battle to establish for terminally ill patients a constitutional right of access to experimental drugs. In an 8-2 ruling, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of... (read the rest)
Glenn McGee in The Scientist: How Much Should Gardasil Cost?
Glenn's August column for The Scientist looks at the HPV vaccine: A sneaky virus has infected 20 million Americans. For most, it's just an inconvenience, causing unattractive lesions. But for some, the infection leads to cancer, killing 250,000 people worldwide and costing billions in medical expenses every year. The vast... (read the rest)
The period of choice
Very soon in pharmacies across the country, the contraceptive Lybrel will become available to those women with a prescription. Instead of menstruating once a month, as with traditional oral contraceptives, or once every three months, as with the more recent Seasonale and Seasonique, women will be able to eliminate menstruation... (read the rest)
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