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...
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...
by Alison Bass | Sep 8, 2011 | conflicts of interest, FDA, health insurers, National Institutes of Health, university industry collaboration
At a time when our own government has stepped back from requiring true transparency about conflicts of interest in medicine, French lawmakers seem to be heading in a much bolder direction. According to Nature Medicine, the French national assembly is considering a...
by Alison Bass | Aug 24, 2011 | conflicts of interest, National Institutes of Health, university industry collaboration
The newly announced rules on financial conflicts of interest among federally funded researchers are certainly an improvement on the existing regulations issued by the National Institutes of Health in 1995 (which were never enforced anyway). But as ethicists and...
by Alison Bass | Aug 10, 2011 | drug marketing, ghostwriting, medical devices, scientific journal retractions, university industry collaboration
The retraction of studies in medical and scientific journals has surged in the last decade, according to separate analyses done by the Wall Street Journal and Retraction Watch. In its page-one article today, the Journal noted that while just 22 retraction notices...
by Alison Bass | Aug 3, 2011 | antipsychotic drugs, conflicts of interest, health care costs, university industry collaboration
Medicare and social services for vulnerable Americans are not the only programs on the chopping block with Washington’s deal to raise the debt ceiling and cut trillions of dollars in government spending. Looming ahead may be deep cuts in funding for medical and...
