by Alison Bass | Jun 7, 2012 | biotech industry, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
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 story, Grassley...
by Alison Bass | May 30, 2012 | biotech industry, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
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...
by Alison Bass | May 16, 2012 | clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, FDA, medical devices, pharmaceutical industry, public health
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 the agency’s advisory...
by Alison Bass | May 8, 2012 | antidepressants, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, media coverage, National Institutes of Health, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized
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 to drug oversight “is...
by Alison Bass | Apr 27, 2012 | 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
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 Brandeis University. The...
by Alison Bass | Apr 12, 2012 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, drug marketing, FDA, health care costs, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct
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 inside out. As Healy, a noted...
by Alison Bass | Feb 20, 2012 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, health care costs, pharmaceutical industry
When Dr. Irving Kirsch published his meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine in February 2008 showing that antidepressants were no more effective than a placebo in treating mild or moderate depression, the national news media ignored his explosive findings, for the most part....
by Alison Bass | Feb 7, 2012 | antidepressants, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, FDA, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct
I was hesitant to weigh in at first when I learned that Brown University’s School of Medicine had decided not to pressure a psychiatric journal to retract the seriously flawed Paxil study that I wrote about in Side Effects. After all, Brown has been covering up...
by Alison Bass | Jan 26, 2012 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, continuing medical education, drug marketing, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, university industry collaboration
The Obama administration recently made it clear that it will require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment under the new health care law — see the New York Times. Large numbers...
by Alison Bass | Jan 18, 2012 | antipsychotic drugs, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, expert testimony, media coverage, pharmaceutical industry, whistleblowing
Allen Jones, the whistleblower in an ongoing landmark trial against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, was very much on my mind this past weekend. I was participating in a workshop to develop curriculum to teach college students about the importance of...
