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About Me
Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and MIT's Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
One solution to prescription drug overdoses: make Oyxcontin and similar drugs safer
Share In my previous blogs about West Virginia’s shockingly high rate of prescription drug overdoses — the Mountain State has the second highest rate of overdoses in the nation — I focused on “the culture of disability” that created this … Continue reading
Posted in biotech industry, drug marketing, medical devices, opiods, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, public health, Uncategorized
Tagged drug formularies, Medicare, Oxycontin, pharmaceutical companies, prescription drug overdoses, Vicodin, West Virginia, West Virginia University
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Falsely inflated statistics about sex trafficking in the U.S. make bad policy and laws
Share Wasn’t it Mark Twain who said that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes? I thought of his famous quote when my husband passed along a link he had … Continue reading
Moving to the Mountain State lock stock but no barrels…
Share For those of you haven’t heard, I’ve accepted a tenure-track teaching position in the School of Journalism at West Virginia University and am moving to Morgantown — see WVU’s announcement here. With all the packing and unpacking the move … Continue reading
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What Canada can teach us about the public health benefits of decriminalizing prostitution
Share Just as Canada has provided us with a model for affordable health care, our neighbors to the north may also be leading the way on another key issue: reducing the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitting diseases. A … Continue reading
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US Senator raises concerns about possible stock manipulation by Vertex executives
Share Senator Charles Grassley is upping the ante on the controversy surrounding the Vertex pharmaceutical executives who cashed in on overstated clinical trial data — see my blog from last week. According to The Boston Globe, which broke the Vertex … Continue reading
Vertex pharmaceutical executives cash in on false hopes
Share Senior executives at Vertex Pharmaceuticals made millions of dollars each by selling company stock in the days after the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical reported promising clinical trial data on an experimental drug for cystic fibrosis. And then weeks after they cashed … Continue reading
Institute of Medicine report concludes that the FDA is not doing adequate job of assessing drug benefits and risks
Share Two weeks ago, I headlined my blog with this question: Is the FDA violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? Four days later, the national Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a 233-page report concluding that FDA’s current approach … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, media coverage, National Institutes of Health, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
Tagged British Medical Journal, FDA, Institute of Medicine, Nature, NIH, noncompliance with 2007 law, postmarketing studies, safety of drugs
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Is the FDA violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs?
Share Is the Food and Drug Administration violating its own mandate to approve safe drugs? That was the question that Donald Light, co-author of The Risk for Prescription Drugs and a long-time medical sociologist, posed at a talk yesterday at … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, biotech industry, clinical trials, continuing medical education, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, medical devices, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct, suicide rates, Uncategorized
Tagged antidepressants, clinical trials, Congress, Donald Light, FDA, Massachusetts Legislature, me-too drugs, off-label use, pipeline, safety and effectiveness of drugs
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Here’s to a New Year without our own breast implant scandal
Share In preparing for the holidays, you may have missed the French scandal over the defective artificial breasts implanted in hundreds of thousands of women. According to NPR, an estimated 400,000 women worldwide have received the faulty implants, and 30,000 … Continue reading
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UnitedHealth Group: A case example of the problem with for-profit health care
Share A few weeks before Thanksgiving, my husband, a hospice social worker, was told that his hours were being cut back from full to part-time. The explanation given to him, a six-year employee with solid performance reviews, was that the … Continue reading
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