by Alison Bass | Dec 18, 2008 | Uncategorized
I’m delighted to see that The New York Times has discovered the problem of ghostwriting — wherein drug companies pay shills to write medical journal articles and then go hunting for respected doctors to put their names on already prepared articles. And I...
by Alison Bass | Dec 11, 2008 | Uncategorized
Kudos to The Boston Globe for revealing a big loophole in Massachusetts’ new disclosure rules for health professionals: doctors who receive lucrative consulting and research funding from drug companies do not need to disclose these payments under the proposed...
by Alison Bass | Dec 3, 2008 | Uncategorized
In its landmark lawsuit against GlaxoSmithKline, the New York State Attorney General accused the pharmaceutical giant of consumer fraud for not publishing negative findings about its antidepressant, Paxil, in essence, for not giving doctors and consumers the full...
by Alison Bass | Nov 25, 2008 | Uncategorized
If I were the parent of a child diagnosed with bipolar disorder by doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital and prescribed anti-psychotic drugs with serious side effects, how would I feel upon learning that the head honcho of MGH’s child psychiatry department...
by Alison Bass | Nov 19, 2008 | Uncategorized
I found a disturbing common thread emerge this week from news coverage of the medical-pharmaceutical industry, a thread that can be summed in these words: If you can’t buy them, bully them. First off, we have reports in The New York Times and Pharmalot that an...
by Alison Bass | Nov 6, 2008 | Uncategorized
Between teaching journalism and working on my master’s thesis, I have only now found the time to scrutinize the much-heralded Zoloft study published last Friday in the online version of The New England Journal of Medicine. And I have a few bones to pick with it,...
by Alison Bass | Oct 28, 2008 | Uncategorized
In 2003. researchers at Tufts University published a study showing that it cost drug companies approximately $800 million to develop a new drug and get it approved by the FDA. In the intervening years, the drug industry has used that mind-boggling cost estimate to...
by Alison Bass | Oct 22, 2008 | Uncategorized
A bewildered tone seemed to permeate the news reports this week that suicide rates among middle-aged Americans rose sharply from 1999 to 2005. Even the authors of the new analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine said they had no idea why the suicide...
by Alison Bass | Oct 15, 2008 | Uncategorized
The Senate Finance Committee’s probe of physicians with extensive financial conflicts is gathering steam: first, Stanford University removed its psychiatry chief Alan Schatzberg as principal investigator of a federally funded study after Congressional investigators...
by Alison Bass | Oct 5, 2008 | Uncategorized
The academic kingpins who made so money at the trough of Big Pharma are starting to fall. This weekend, Charles Nemeroff stepped down from his post as chairman of Emory’s Department of Psychiatry pending an investigation into allegations that he failed to fully...
