The Honorable Jacob J. Lew Chief of Staff The White House Washington, DC 20500 Dear Chief of Staff Lew: In March 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, which included the Physician Payments Sunshine Act (PPSA). We applauded its passage but, nearly three years later, we are disappointed that the PPSA […]
I was twenty-one and in one of those spaces life sometimes bring. College was behind me and I was living at home in Chattanooga for the last time, though my childhood friends were by then scattered to the wind. One weekend, I drove to Memphis where I would be be entering medical school in the […]
Something very right is trying to happen: Editor Fiona Godlee’s BMJ decision [God Save the Queen!…, in praise of Fiona Godlee…], the European Medical Authority’s plan [any news is good news…], the TEST Act in the US [the TEST Act…], AllTrials [click it and sign it…], the Cochrane Group’s negotiations with Roche about Tamiflu, etc. […]
Dear Dr Nardo We have always said who funded us when they funded us. The SourceWatch page you reference is at least 7 or 8 years out of date. Our most recent funding information is on our website here: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/funding.html The £15,000 from companies is not £15,000 from pharma. Contributors are listed on our website, […]
ex·pert [kspûrt] ·noun a person who has extensive skill or knowledge in a particular field ·adjective 1. skilful or knowledgeable 2. of, involving, or done by an expert – an expert job [from Latin expertus – known by experience, from experiri – to test…] Last year, a friend called from the road, driving back from […]
I’ve never really addressed C.M.E. [Continuing Medical Education] on this blog, but it’s yet another open portal for the pharmaceutical influence on practicing physicians – readily available because C.M.E. is a requirement for licensure. This one was passed on to me by a friend, someone I met at the TMAP Trial in Austin. She sent […]
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot, 1925
Several days ago, I posted a link to AllTrials [the red folder upper left] with gret enthusiasm. I’m still enthusiastic, but as always, there’s a glitch. Cam posted a warning to look at Sense-About-Science on SourceWatch. where he found some problematic funding [Association of the British Pharmaceutial Industry, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer]. Then Annonymous went to the […]
Reading and writing about the early Prozac days this last week has kind of gotten to me. I had read it before some time back in David Healy’s Let Them Eat Prozac, but I knew less then. I didn’t know the context well enough to see that it was such an industry wide story. I […]
I got a bit off track in fleshing out the Akathisia story from the early Prozac days. I found two resources that lay out the narrative using Eli Lilly internal documents – both came from the Bill Forsyth Sr. case that went to trial in 1999 [The Guardian: They said it was safe]: But since […]