Happy Thanksgiving: You’re fired. Donald Trump couldn’t have done it with more aplomb. “Health system TriHealth had a message for 150 employees Wednesday: We really mean it this time. The 150 workers who didn’t get the required flu shots by the Nov. 16 deadline received termination notices the day before Thanksgiving…” On November 20,…
This has been a big week for long articles about the role (read: SCANDAL) of money in the so-called science of medicine. Scientific American has a very worthwhile article with a focus on drugs for osteoporosis. I covered this subject once before. Charles Seife, the author, is an academic who worked very hard to piece…
Spiriva had an unusual marketing strategy when it came out: I was told (while eating a free lunch) it was a great drug, but could take a very long time to show benefit: therefore, give it to patients for 6 months before concluding lack of benefit. A six month trial cost the patient about $1,000….
Another blockbuster article from the BMJ: Medtronic paid hundreds of millions of dollars (most to doctors) to write its own articles on a spinal fusion device and genetically engineered protein to stimulate bone growth: The US medical device company Medtronic was “heavily involved in drafting, editing, and shaping the content of medical journal articles authored…
Dr. Flegel, a professor of medicine and senior associate editor of the CMAJ, last week weighed in to support compulsory flu vaccinations on the basis that the following was met: “… there must be an outbreak of serious illness; immunity levels must be low; the vaccine must be effective, safe and available; and vaccine uptake must be low.”…
Re: Clinical trial data for all drugs in current use 31 October 2012 Dr. Godlee’s editorial (BMJ 2012; 345 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e7304) underscores the importance of the GlaxoSmithKline decision to allow access to anonymized patient level data from its clinical trials. Meta-analysts can now work more efficiently in summarizing knowledge relating to the benefits and risks of…
The courageous BMJ and editor Fiona Godlee have dared to suggest the only way forward through the quicksand of clinical trial data in which we find ourselves. When only the manufacturer knows what is in a drug’s database, and the manufacturer’s primary duty is to shareholders, medicine progresses backwards to a new Dark Age. Simply,…
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