I was sitting in the waiting room Friday morning waiting for an ENT appointment [to check a worrisome non-healing lesion in my nostril]. The big tv was looping through an animated description of some balloon thing they could do to your sinuses and a hearing aid spiel about why getting them from an ENT is […]
When I mentioned the sponsorship of the STAT Morning Rounds page [explanation?…], George Dawson implied in a comment that my radar was perhaps set too low: What would you call it if I gave a lecture for CME, unrelated to prescribing but it was sponsored by Big Pharma – even though I had nothing to […]
I want to linger on the response of the Annals of Internal Medicine to the COMPare letter pointing out an instance of a published paper that reported outcomes differing from those in the a priori Protocol. Here’s the letter from COMPare: Discrepancies Between Prespecified and Reported Outcomes Annals of Internal Medicine by Eirion Slade; Henry […]
The Hidden Harm of Antidepressants An in-depth analysis of clinical trials reveals widespread underreporting of negative side effects, including suicide attempts and aggressive behavior Scientific American By Diana Kwon February 3, 2016 Antidepressants are some of the most commonly prescribed medications out there. More than one out of 10 Americans over age 12 — roughly […]
I signed up for STAT on the Boston Globe because Pharmalot moved there. But the new additions to the morning emails these last several days have given me pause. We could use an explanation… UPDATE: Megan’s response to an email: Hi Mickey, They’re simply sponsors for the newsletter — they’re paid advertisements that come from […]
American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan balked at the term "Unconscious," preferring "Selective Inattention" to explain realities that people simply omit. It’s a particularly apt term for some recent commentaries appearing in our medical literature. In notes from a reluctant parasite…, I mentioned Dr. Jeffrey Drazen’s editorial and the subsequent series by his reporter in the […]
It was something of an irony to be immersed in trying to make sense out of someone else’s study [the reason I stopped blogging for a while], and then to read that I was a member of a new class of researchers – "data parasites." Jeffrey Drazen, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, […]
I took a several week unpaid leave of absence from blogging and email commerce to do a number intense project. I found that I just couldn’t do it if I thought about anything else. I finished the part that had to be done yesterday, and look forward to returning to my normal mental life. Looking […]
I got an email asking if I was sick [because I’ve been quiet for a week]. No, I am just knee deep in a project that involves scrolling through endless monotonous spreadsheets, and I just can’t look at a computer after a few [or more] hours of that. Probably another week more I would guess. […]
Don’t be alarmed. This isn’t one of those long boring posts with formulas and numbers. The graphic below is just window dressing to make one simple point: I’ve been writing a mini-tutorial for evaluating Clinical Trials, and this spreadsheet will generate the needed information in the absence of Data Transparency. All we need for the […]