pharmaceutical industry
vlicata | August 30, 2010Wow! Either it's an odd coincidence, or the Latisse marketers are highly vigilant monetizers, because in less than 24 hours after I posted yesterday's rambling little piece about the eyelash wonder drug, a tasteful little ad for it showed up on the Scienceblogs homepage (cue spooky music now). Robot voice: "Oh yes, I will go buy Latisse now." I will try it on my cats, because I have always thought that cats with long eyelashes are wickedly beautiful.
But, Latisse, your ad says "ask your doctor about Latisse" -- I'm a bit disappointed. How could you pass up such a ripe possibility for pun…
vlicata | August 29, 2010The existence of the drug Latisse is clearly a harbinger of the end of modern civilization, in more ways than one, but it is also intensely fascinating and creepy. When I first heard of it, about a year ago, I really thought it was some sort of satirical article about the current status of big pharma and their slow but steady drift towards more (and more profitable) "lifestyle" medications. But no...it's frickin' real! Its original use was (is) to control glaucoma, but it was noticed that a side effect of such treatment was long and luxurious eyelashes. So, since about the beginning of…
vlicata | March 10, 2010In the Feb 26 issue of Science, the Chief Patent Counsel for GlaxoSmithKline has written a "Policy Forum" article outlining the reasons that the pharmaceutical industry needs longer and stronger patent protection on its new drugs (to fend off those nasty generics). I was kind of shocked to see such a propaganda piece in Science, but I suppose it is all part of looking at both (all) sides of an issue. Big pharma has been telling us how tough they've got it for years, and the argument that they must charge very high prices to pay for all that R&D is so old that you can probably find it…
ddobbs | January 31, 2010
The Rise Of Marketing-Based Medicine
64 Comments
By Ed Silverman // January 28th, 2010 // 7:57 am
You've heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so - ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs - that the authors call marketing-based medicine. And they rely on internal documents from litigation - such as the much-publicized lawsuits over antipsychotics and antidepressants - to illustrate their point.
A stunning must-read from Ed…
ddobbs | December 22, 2009via Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
For a while now, the FDA and other regulators have been looking at safety risks associated with a few drugs patients sometimes take before getting MRI scans.
While it's common for new risks to crop up with established drugs, the Times of London this weekend highlighted an interesting twist in this case: GE has filed a libel suit in Britain against a Danish radiologist who gave a talk about the risks associated with Omniscan, a GE drug that's one of the medicines regulators have been looking at.
The doctor, Henrik Thomsen, gave a presentation to about 30…
terrasig | August 10, 2009I know that we have been very fortunate to attract a few new readers over the last year or so. For those, and as a reminder to others, I wanted to focus on some of my major blog influences. One of these is Derek Lowe, an early science blogger who is perhaps the only pharmaceutical company chemist who writes under his own name. Dr Lowe writes the blog, In The Pipeline.
Dr Lowe gives invaluable insights into the industry about companies large, small, and tiny, and provides on of the few places where scientists entering the job market can truly get a glimpse of what it's like to work for a…
ddobbs | March 4, 2009I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just coincidence that brings in a few days an archetypal pharma scandal, an unexpected and emphatic Supreme court reversal, an underwear check administered to the entire faculty of the Harvard Medical School, and the decision to "make an example" of surgeons who took kickbacks for using medical devices.
The…
ddobbs | February 20, 2009A roundup of wonderful stuff I won't get to. Then again, many of these need no help:
"Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m. Bring wine and caviar only.". Woman emails party invitations while asleep. Hat tip: BoingBoing
Obviously, the drug and medical device industry is not looking forward to independent research that compares expensive new drugs or procedures to older and less expensive treatments. Alison Bass on objections to (and spirited attacks on) the stimulus bill's funding of comparative effectiveness studies -- a subject I hope to write more about soon…
ddobbs | February 10, 2009Marcia Angell makes it plain:
The fact that drug companies pay prescribers to be "educated" underscores the true nature of the transaction. Students generally pay teachers, not the reverse. The real intent is to influence prescribing habits, through selection of the information provided and through the warm feelings induced by bribery. Prescribers join in the pretence that drug companies provide education because it is lucrative to do so. Even free samples are meant to hook doctors and patients on the newest, most expensive drugs, when older drugs -- or no drug at all -- might be better for…
ddobbs | January 27, 2009
Pharma giant Pfizer got bigger on Monday, purchasing Wyeth Pharamceuticals for $65 billion in one of the few big business moves to get funding lately. This comes after several years of aggressive cost-cutting and huge layoffs at Pfizer, and was announced as the company released an annual report revealing a $2.3 billion settlement for offl-label marketing.
At least one Pfizer employee feels that Wyeth employees should be warned.
I feel sorry for the good people of Wyeth. You didn't ask to be gobbled up by this monster. As for myself, I was just to lazy/stupid/complacent to leave. I got…
ddobbs | November 25, 2008More wheels coming off the bus.
Research Center Tied to Drug Company - NYTimes.com:
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: November 24, 2008
When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he had reported to his university, he said that his interests were "solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study."
But e-mail messages and internal documents from Johnson & Johnson made public in a court filing reveal that Dr. Biederman pushed the company to…
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…