…And all through the town not a creature was stirring except for some struggling to stay awake throughout the night shift…. So reads a newspaper ad for a federally-controlled substance in prescription drug form that is marketed for ES caused by SWD or OSA. Don’t know what that means? Come on. Where have you been? [...]
The following is a guest post by William Heisel, one of our HealthNewsReview.org story reviewers, and publisher of his own excellent blog, Antidote: Investigating Untold Health Stories. ——————————————————————————————————————————————————– Italian researchers this week published a small study indicating that a type of hormone could help improve the sex lives of women going through menopause. Stories about [...]
William Heisel, who is one of story reviewers on HealthNewsReview.org, also blogs on the Reporting on Health website of the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships program at USC Annenberg. He wrote the following post on that blog, and today, that blog and ours has begun to share content – cross-posting occasionally. Thanks to Michelle Levander [...]
As he so often does, Merrill Goozner offers some important historical perspective to the news, as he headlined it: “Xigris Pulled – $1 Billion Later.” Excerpt: “Another over-hyped and over-marketed drug bites the dust. Eli Lilly earlier this week pulled Xigris from the market after a clinical trial showed it provided no benefit for hospital [...]
The Australian is a Rupert Murdoch newspaper – Australia’s only national newspaper. It has been running articles and video clips about health policy in a series called “Health of the Nation”, sponsored by an Australian drug industry group. The series culminated in a glossy, 24-page magazine that included feature articles, and advertorials and advertisements for [...]
Item #1: How prevalent are financial conflicts of interest among people writing clinical practice guidelines in Canada and the US? An analysis published in the BMJ of 14 such guidelines reports: Among the 288 panel members, 138 (48%) reported conflicts of interest at the time of the publication of the guideline and 150 (52%) either [...]
A new edition of the ProPublica “Dollars for Docs” project
Catchup from last week: Dartmouth’s Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz had a New York Times op-ed piece last week, “Think Inside the Box,” promoting their terrific idea of “a simple model” for conveying “independent, plain-English facts” about prescription drugs. They write: “The government should follow through on proposals to require fact boxes, similar to those [...]
Physician-blogger Elaine Schattner writes that Gregg of the Allman Brothers has hepatitis C and has “teamed with” or is “working with” Merck to promote hep C awareness. She blogs: “The ethics of this are complicated: On the one hand, it might be a good thing for a music icon to raise public awareness about hepatitis [...]
Researchers from Harvard and the University of Illinois at Chicago have published “Principles of Conservative Prescribing” in the Archives of Internal Medicine. They write: The concept sums up lessons from past experience as well as from recent studies demonstrating that medications are commonly used inappropriately, overused, and associated with significant harm–suggesting the need to more [...]
This story focuses on a family that may have a rare genetic mutation that increases their risk of heart disease. Unfortunately, the “rare” part wasn’t mentioned until 1,600 words into this 2,100 word story.
While this story adequately addressed 7 of our 10 criteria, the 3 on which it missed were significant omissions, yet could have been easily addressed.
Solid medical conference reporting, with many expert interviews and good context provided. Goes far beyond the conference presentation itself.
We will not display your name or e-mail address on the site, nor will we share youre-mail address with any third parties.
For site updates and news from Gary, find us on Twitter:
HealthNewsReview: @HealthNewsRevu
Gary Schwitzer: @garyschwitzer
Copyright © 2013 Health News Review
