by Alison Bass | Oct 28, 2011 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, FDA, medical devices, suicide rates
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...
by Alison Bass | Oct 13, 2011 | public health
Reading Russell Banks’ fascinating new novel, The Lost Memory of Skin, has inspired me to blog about a public health problem that strays from my usual mandate. Banks’ book is about a 21-year-old man who was convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old girl (statutory...
by Alison Bass | Sep 30, 2011 | health care costs, university industry collaboration
The current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains a thoughtful essay about who owns federally funded research: the universities who receive the funding or the private companies who contract with academic researchers to develop a specific innovation for...
by Alison Bass | Sep 23, 2011 | conflicts of interest, health care costs
At a Harvard event last night honoring the former Grassley investigator Paul Thacker, someone in the audience wanted to know how the topic of Thacker’s talk — Dollars for Doctors: Who owns your physician? — was related to the soaring cost of medical...
by Alison Bass | Sep 14, 2011 | health care costs, media coverage, pharmaceutical industry
Recent media coverage of the heated debate over Texas Governor Rick Perry’s endorsement of mandatory HPV vaccinations for school-age girls in his state seems to be missing a few crucial points. First, many of the medical groups who strongly endorsed the vaccine...
