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 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 | 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...
