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...
