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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.
Tag Archives: FDA
Plot twists in Soderbergh’s new movie Side Effects strain belief
Share I went to see Steven Soderbergh’s new film, Side Effects, with anticipation and dread. The movie, after all, carries the same name as my 2008 book, Side Effects and from what I could tell of the trailers, its plot … Continue reading
Fast-moving bill in Congress would weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and devices
Share Congress is moving quickly to pass a bill that would authorize higher industry fees for the FDA in exchange for speeding up the approval of some drugs and medical devices and eliminating restrictions on financial conflicts of interest among … 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
2 Comments
How drug companies continue to hide the true story of Tamiflu and other drugs from the American public
Share I’ve been reading Dr. David Healy’s new book, Pharmageddon, and while some of it may seem like old news, I was struck by his fresh analysis of how the pharmaceutical industry has turned the original purpose of clinical trials … Continue reading
Deceptive drug research practices explain why over-medicating of children still going on
Share A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability office confirms something that Rose Firestein, the eponymous prosecutor in the title of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial noticed way back in the ’90s: that … Continue reading
Drug and medical device industry launches push to weaken FDA oversight
Share With the Obama administration hobbled by a Republican-led Congress, the pharmaceutical and medical device industry seems to have launched a concerted push to roll back regulatory initiatives designed to protect consumers from unproven or unsafe drugs and medical devices. … Continue reading