by Alison Bass | Jan 5, 2012 | Uncategorized
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 women in...
by Alison Bass | Dec 26, 2011 | Uncategorized
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 hospice’s census had declined...
by Alison Bass | Dec 12, 2011 | Uncategorized
I almost choked over my tea this morning when reading this The New York Times story, the gist of which was that French regulations governing conflicts of interest in medicine are considerably more lax than our own. If only that were true. The NYT article described how...
by Alison Bass | Dec 2, 2011 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, FDA, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry
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...
by Alison Bass | Nov 18, 2011 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct
The international research organization Healthy Skepticism has called on Brown University to help convince a psychiatric journal to retract the controversial Paxil trial that I wrote about in Side Effects, according to the Brown Daily Herald. The principal...
by Alison Bass | Nov 17, 2011 | biotech industry, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized, university industry collaboration
We’ve all signed those vague privacy statements when visiting our local hospital for medical care. But how many of us have actually read the fine print and understand that the most sensitive details of our medical lives may be shared with drug companies for...
by Alison Bass | Nov 2, 2011 | antipsychotic drugs, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, ghostwriting, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, scientific misconduct, Uncategorized
On November 28, the Texas Attorney General is expected to begin a landmark trial against Johnson & Johnson on charges that the pharmaceutical giant “subverted scientific integrity” by paying off academic psychiatrists and state officials to boost the...
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...
