Social Issues
j7uy5 | April 30, 2007Just
in case you are a physician looking for a reason to avoid drug reps,
you should read this article on PLOS Medicine. It is an
enlightening, if sickening, inside view of pharmaceutical sales
practices.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040150">Following
the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors
Adriane
Fugh-Berman*, Shahram Ahari
April
24, 2007
...Unlike
the door-to-door vendors of cosmetics and vacuum cleaners, drug reps do
not sell their product…
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007The
first two posts in this series are
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">here
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a_1.php">here.
The final editorial in the NEJM's three-part series on FDA reform takes
it's title from a line in the Institute of Medicine report:
href="http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/26341.aspx">The Future of
Drug Safety: "This [is] a golden moment of opportunity to
improve fundamentally the way FDA regulation
considers and responds to the evolving understanding…
j7uy5 | April 15, 2007This
is a continuation of the first post,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">Things
That Affect YOU: PDUFA and AERS. PDUFA is
the Prescription
Drug User Fee Act. AERS is the
href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/aers/default.htm">Adverse
Event Reporting System.
The PDUFA is up for review soon, as it expires in September.
If it expires, 40% of the funding for premarketing drug
approval
will disappear.
This has been covered only minimally by the mainstream media.
There is an article on Bloomberg.com (
href="http://www.bloomberg.…
j7uy5 | April 14, 2007The
href="http://content.nejm.org/" rel="tag">New England
Journal of Medicine has a set of three
early-release editorials, all pertaining to prescription drug safety,
and all openly accessible:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078041">Paying
for Drug Approvals — Who's Using Whom?
Jerry Avorn, M.D.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078057">Drug
Safety Reform at the FDA — Pendulum Swing or Systematic
Improvement?
Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D.
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078048…
j7uy5 | April 9, 2007Ordinarily,
I dislike fisking as a literary style, but it does have its
place. This is one of them. As noted in the two
previous posts,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate.php">(Part
One,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate_part_two.php">Part
Two) some authors from the Cato Institute managed to get an
opinion piece published in the LA Times:
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-tanner5apr05,1,6553974.story?ctrack=2&cset=true">Universal
healthcare's dirty little secrets. In…
j7uy5 | April 8, 2007In
order to make sense of this post, you probably need to read
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/health_care_debate.php">Part
One
first.
This is about an opinion piece that was published in the LA Times,
written by some advocates from the
rel="tag">Cato Institute:
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-tanner5apr05,1,6553974.story?ctrack=2&cset=true">Universal
healthcare's dirty little secrets.
Let me get one thing out of the way first. The title is
bullshit. (Yes, that is how I really feel.) There
is nothing dirty, there is…
j7uy5 | April 7, 2007It is
charitable to call it a "debate" about health care. It is
really a flame war with a veneer of civility.
It started with an opinion piece published in what is ordinarily a
respectable publication: the Los Angles Times (free registration
required). Two bloggers jumped on it. Then the
comments came in.
The bloggers who weighed in on this,
href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/ezra_klein_heal.html">Brad
DeLong
and
href="http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/04/health_insuranc.html"
rel="tag">Ezra Klein, both
correctly identified the argument as deeply flawed. But…
j7uy5 | March 24, 2007Finally,
we have a nice succinct statement from a politician on the
subject of health care coverage.
I know this is controversial, in the sense that, so far, the mainstream
operatives in both major parties reject this. Still, I truly
believe that if most people understood the issue, they would agree with
Kucinich.
Most
of the stated objections are based upon ideological concerns, totally
divorced from any sort of objectivity. That is the case
within the Republican party.
Within the Democratic party, it is probably more accurate to say that
it is concern about corporate influence…
j7uy5 | March 21, 2007Yet
Another Critique of Pay for Performance
style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;">
The concept of Pay for Performance is one of those things that seems
sensible and appealing on the surface. But if there was ever
a better example of the maxim, "the devil is in the details," I haven't
seen that particular devil yet.
The latest critique is in the New England Journal. This has
already been mentioned at
href="http://burkemed.blogspot.com/2007/03/make-data-work.html">Medviews,
but I want to add some points.
style="font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;">
href="…
j7uy5 | March 12, 2007The draft for
the
href="http://www.ipcc.ch/">IPCC report for this
year paints a distinctly disturbing picture of the near future.
As reported in
href="http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2007-03-11-climate-report_N.htm?POE=NEWISVA">USA
Today (among many others)...
Tens
of millions of Latin Americans who now
have water will be short of it in less than 20 years.
By
2080, between 200 million and 600 million
people could be hungry because of global warming's effects.
About
100 million people each year could be
flooded by 2080 by rising seas. [Think Central…
jstemwedel | March 1, 2007This is another piece in the discussion currently raging about the latitude members of a profession ought to have to follow conscience over the dictates of the profession.
Professions are communities of a sort. What unites them is that the members of that community are taking on a certain set of shared values.
This does not mean all members of a given profession are unanimous about all their values. A profession does not assimilate its members like the Borg. Indeed, there's something to be said for a professional community that reflects a diversity of values and perspectives -- it gives…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007On Abel's post on conscience clauses, Bob Koepp left this comment:
It's a pretty warped understanding of professionalism that would require professionals to violate their own sincere ethical beliefs. After all, someone lacking personal integrity probably isn't going to be much concerned with professional integrity. "You can trust me because I lack the strength of my convictions."
I think the connection between personal integrity and professional integrity is an important one, so here are some preliminary thoughts on it.
Joining a profession requires some buy-in to the shared values of that…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007Abel at Terra Sigillata has a post about coscience clauses for pharmacists that's worth a read. In it, he takes issue with the stand of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), a professional pharmacy organization, recognizing "a pharmacist's right to decline to participate in therapies that he or she finds morally, religiously, or ethically troubling" while supporting "the establishment of systems that protect the patient's right to obtain legally prescribed and medically indicated treatments while reasonably accommodating in a nonpunitive manner the pharmacist's right of…
j7uy5 | February 25, 2007Sometimes I go to sites such as
href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/" rel="tag">Yes!
or Ode,
looking for a positive spin on current events. Another is the
McClatchy
site, where they have an
href="http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/good_news/">entire
section devoted to good news.
But then, there is this:
href="http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/16760690.htm">U.S.
economy leaving record numbers in severe poverty
By Tony Pugh
McClatchy Newspapers
Thu, Feb. 22, 2007
WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor
Americans who are living in severe…
j7uy5 | February 4, 2007Part eight. Speaking of odds, do you remember who
href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/julian/">Percy Julian
was?
His work with steroids and alkaloids helped bring about a
host of
affordable and effective treatments for diseases like rheumatoid
arthritis and
glaucoma, benefiting millions worldwide.
According to one of the ScienceBlogs sponsors, PBS, he "against all
odds...became one of the greatest scientists of the 20th
Century." He
was an African-American, born in Alabama, attended Harvard, but was not
able to finish due to financial problems, possibly because of the lack
of…
j7uy5 | January 17, 2007The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists site is back to normal, only now they have a new, secondary theme.
They are considering both climate change AND the risk of nuclear catastrophe. Based upon their deliberations, they have moved the clock two minutes closer to midnight. The announcement was made at a conference at the Royal Society in London. Stephen Hawking spoke, as noted by The Independent:
"As we stand at the brink of a second nuclear age and a period of unprecedented climate change, scientists have a special responsibility, once again, to inform the public and to advise leaders about…
j7uy5 | January 4, 2007...from a psychological standpoint, that is. This is the
topic of an article in the current edition of
style="font-style: italic;">Foreign Policy.
In it, the authors examine the effect of common systematic
cognitive errors, or biases, on the process of evaluating the prospects
for war. They argue that when a country's leaders are
contemplating war, the hawks invariably have an advantage in the debate:
style="font-weight: bold;"
href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3660">Why
Hawks Win
By Daniel Kahneman, Jonathan Renshon
January/February 2007
...In fact,…
j7uy5 | January 2, 2007There have been stories and novels about the end of privacy.
1984, by George Orwell, comes to mind. I also
remember reading a science fiction short story once, about how
technology had made privacy so difficult to maintain, and so accepted
by society, that it was considered rude to want privacy. I
can't remember who wrote that one.
This post was inspired by an article in the Wall Street Journal, that
points out how little privacy there is when it comes to medical
records. More below the fold...
Time Magazine just published 25 "top-10" lists for 2006. One
of the lists is for
href="…
jstemwedel | December 15, 2006Razib tossed off a post expressing amazement that a very attractive wine bar hostess was making science fiction recommendations. The noteworthy feature, apparently, was "the intersection of science fiction & female physical hotitude."
Predictably, others have commented on this post, worrying about the casual profiling of hot chicks as not into S/F, or perhaps of women who are into S/F as closeted ugly chicks (or closeted boys).
Should I pile on? Maybe just a little.
Even if the original claim was restricted to the probability of the intersection of (people who like) science fiction and…
jstemwedel | December 6, 2006It started when someone asked Dr. B. for advice about starting a Ph.D. program with three kids in tow. Since then, the question has been bouncing around the academic blogosphere, with posts you should read at Academom and Geeky Mom. Although this is absolutely the worst time in the semester for me to fire on all cyliders with this one, regular readers know that I've shared my own experiences in this area, so I can't stay completely out of it.
A brief recap of the current conversation:
Dr. B. notes the many ways graduate programs set things up that are easier for the childless than the child…