by Alison Bass | Jan 12, 2011 | Uncategorized
For weeks now, The Boston Globe has been running stories about Sanofi Aventi’s hostile bid to acquire Genzyme, the Boston-based biotech giant. One recent story talked about how the CEOs of both companies attended the same conference in San Francisco without...
by Alison Bass | Jan 6, 2011 | Uncategorized
Just last night, a friend of mine mentioned that an acquaintance of hers, a woman in her 50s who was taking prescription drugs for several conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure, died from an overdose of legally prescribed drugs. Which is why I was not...
by Alison Bass | Dec 16, 2010 | Uncategorized
Over the past two years there has been a steady diet of books and media reports about the disturbing influence the pharmaceutical industry has on medical research and doctors’ prescribing patterns. Not a week goes by without a new report on the marketing muscle...
by Alison Bass | Dec 2, 2010 | Uncategorized
At the risk of tooting my own horn, I thought I’d post this video that was produced by Mount Holyoke College about the multimedia journalism class I teach there and our collaboration with the local newspaper, The Daily Hampshire Gazette. The video talks about...
by Alison Bass | Dec 1, 2010 | Uncategorized
Much has been written about the insidious practice of ghost-writing in medical research in this and other blogs and news articles. Even Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), expressed dismay over the problem in a C-SPAN...
by Alison Bass | Nov 15, 2010 | Uncategorized
My blog last week on Helen Mayberg’s talk at the 2010 ScienceWriters conference caused quite a stir. Paul Raeburn, writing in the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, accused me of being wrong on the facts and several commenters defended Mayberg’s research...
by Alison Bass | Nov 10, 2010 | Uncategorized
Dr. Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at Emory University, had top billing at the annual Science Writers conference in New Haven Sunday to talk about her work in using deep brain stimulation to treat depression. Nearly 500 writers, editors, public information officers and...
by Alison Bass | Sep 27, 2010 | Uncategorized
In the latest twist to the saga of Alternatives 2010, the National Empowerment Center, which organized the conference, has apparently reversed course and restored the original language to Will Hall’s workshop — see my earlier blog about the brouhaha over...
by Alison Bass | Sep 27, 2010 | Uncategorized
Less than week before the opening of Alternatives 2010, a conference dedicated to promoting alternatives for better mental health care, the organizers did a strange thing: they decided to remove any language about coming off medications from the title and description...
by Alison Bass | Jul 15, 2010 | Uncategorized
I’ve been experiencing a strong sense of deju vu ever since Gardiner Harris’ story in The New York Times earlier this week that GlaxoSmithKline hid negative findings about a bestselling drug and misrepresented data in a clinical trial of the drug. This...
