Pharma
ddobbs | May 9, 2008In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide" who all reportedly have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants -- as does the radio series, known as "The Infinite Mind," that produced the show.
As the story notes, the extent of the financial ties are…
ddobbs | May 7, 2008From Well, Tara Parker-Hope's health blog at the NY Times:
More than half of the task force members who will oversee the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s most important diagnostic handbook have ties to the drug industry, reports a consumer watchdog group.
The Web site for Integrity in Science, a project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, highlights the link between the drug industry and the all-important psychiatric manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The handbook is the most-used guide for diagnosing mental disorders…
ddobbs | April 9, 2008We've seen our brain on drugs. Here's the dope on brainy people on drugs.
Survey results of 1400 scientists (or Nature readers, anyway) on use of neuroenhancers
Figure from Nature, "Poll results: look who's doping"
With baseball's steroid scandals seemingly behind us now -- or at least considered less newsworthy -- the press has recently turned some of its steroidal attention to neuroenhancement among major league academics. The journal Nature has taken the lead here, publishing a commentary in early March by two Cambridge University researchers who "reported," as a nicely turned New York…
ddobbs | March 21, 2008Some great stuff I've come across, lack time to blog on, but would hate for you to miss:
In On being certain, neurologist and novelist Robert Burton, who writes a column at Slate Salon, looks at the science of what makes us feel certain about things -- even when we're dead wrong about them. His book on the subject, which I read in advance copy a while back, is fascinating fun reading. The most startling (and disorienting) finding he describes is that, from a neurocognitive point of view, our feeling of certainty about things we're wrong about is pretty much indistinguishable from our…
sciencetolife | March 18, 2008
Two MIT pharmaceutical industry experts believe that the mounting U.S. drug price crisis can be contained and eventually reversed by separating drug discovery from drug marketing and by establishing a non-profit company to oversee funding for new medicines.
The experts are Stan Finkelstein, M.D., senior research scientist in MIT's Engineering Systems Division, and Peter Temin, Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics and they detail their proposal in their new book, "Reasonable Rx: Solving the Drug Price Crisis" (published by Financial Times Press).
Drawing on recent history, they propose…
ddobbs | March 12, 2008The Kirsch study published a few weeks ago has stirred much discussion of the placebo power of antidepressants (or is it the antidepressant power of placebos?); it's clear that the act of taking a pill that you expect to help you often does help you.
But can the availability of a pill meant for depression make you feel (or think of yourself as) depressed? That's the question behind another part of the drug debate, regarding whether the drug industry encourages us to medicalize ordinary experience.
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004…
ddobbs | March 10, 2008This one's getting a lot of play: There are traceable levels of prescription drugs in many public water supplies.
The Times includes the AP story, which is both long and good. I bumped into it first on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Health Blog : Big Pharma is in the Water
Big Pharma is in the Water
Posted by Sarah Rubenstein
It's not so expensive to get pharmaceuticals after all: Just drink water.
An investigation by the Associated Press found trace amounts of scads of drugs in drinking-water supplies around the country. For a list of what was found in the watersheds of 28 metro areas…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008With so much written here lately about placebos and drug effectiveness, I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo.
This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A crudely shortened version: Some researchers at MIT (none of them Bill Murray, as far as I can tell) gave light shocks to volunteers, then gave them some placebos that were costly and some that were cheap. The costly ones worked better.
It sounds like a bit of a stunt, but as Respectful…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008A quick heads-up: Nature weighs in on the flap over the Kirsch SSRI study that found antidepressants no more effective than placebo. I've given a lot of attention to the placebo issue. Nature stresses another point: That the Kirsch study underscores the need for clinical trial data to be public. At present it is not, as the drug companies have persuaded the FDA that releasing all trial data might reveal trade secrets. Nature argues -- as have many -- that what's being hidden is not proprietary trade secrets but information vital to public health:
No more scavenger hunts
The recent media…
ddobbs | February 29, 2008The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it.
This blog search should help as well.
Some of the more notable responses since yesterday:
Science weighs in. The Times…
ddobbs | February 26, 2008[This is a revised, expanded version of the original heads-up I put up last night.]
A large new meta-analysis of SSRI antidepressant trials concludes that the drugs have essentially no therapeutic effect at all. The study, in PLOS Medicine today, comes on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden.
The PLOS study is a meta-analysis of 47 clinical trials that account for almost all full data on clinical trials of SSRIs such as…
ddobbs | February 25, 2008I've not had time to thoroughly read this yet. But on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden, PLOS Medicine now publishes a larger study -- a meta-analysis of all available data on clinical trials of SSRIs -- that shows that "compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression" --…
sb admin | December 18, 2007 The Onion shares news of a drug designed to alleviate distrust of drug manufacturers.
"Out of a test group of 180, 172 study participants reported a dramatic rise in their passion for pharmaceutical companies," said Pfizer director of clinical research Suzanne Frost. "And 167 asked their doctors about a variety of prescription medications they had seen on TV."
Frost said a small percentage of test subjects showed an interest in becoming lobbyists for one of the top five pharmaceutical companies, and several browsed eBay for drug-company apparel.
PharmAmorin, available in 100-, 200-, and 400-…