I’m honored to be invited to present the 16th Annual Mates David and Hinna Stahl Memorial Lecture at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey tomorrow (April 23). My topic: “Addressing the Ethical Morass at the Intersection of Media, Medicine and Public Health.” (Addendum on April 25: now [...]
2013 is off to a tough start for my family with my 92-year old Dad being hospitalized over the holidays with flu and pneumonia, precipitating a move to an assisted living facility for him and increasing caregiving issues for us. So the volume of publishing on this site may be down a bit. I may [...]
The following is a guest post by Alan Cassels, a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria. Alan was founder of Media Doctor Canada, a project very similar to our HealthNewsReview.org, but a project that is unfortunately on the shelf for now. ————————————————- Life might be looking up for 23andMe, the world’s largest dataset [...]
The following is republished with the permission of its author, Carl Elliott, MD, PhD. It originally appeared on the website, Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Community. The suicide of Dan Markingson at the University of Minnesota has brought notoriety to the CAFÉ study and its site investigators, Stephen Olson and Charles Schulz. But the [...]
The Alt_Mentalities website published a piece, “Lemons into Lemonade: How an off-label marketing fine can be good for business,” tracking Pfizer’s journey through fines for off-label marketing of Neurontin and, later, for Lyrica and other drugs. Punchline question in the piece: “Was taking the hit for off-label marketing in 2004 all part of a plan to boost [...]
An opinion piece in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “Ethics of Commercial Screening Tests,” makes a strong, clear statement about the problems with many screening test campaigns offered by commercial companies in partnerships with churches, pharmacies, shopping malls or trusted medical organizations. Excerpts: “Particular concerns about “the use of ultrasonography (for example, ultrasonography of the [...]
Iain Chalmers, British health-services researcher, and founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, recently wrote a column, “Publish or Perish.” Excerpts: “…failure to publish research results is by far the most common and worrying form of scientific and ethical misconduct in health research – and it has had lethal consequences. Anecdotal evidence of publication bias has existed [...]
Sounds like a children’s bedtime story, doesn’t it? WBZ-TV in Boston reports, “Time To Reverse Pharmaceutical Gift Ban?” Excerpt: Supporters say a gift ban was needed to change a too-cozy relationship between drug companies and doctors. But critics say it’s costing the Massachusetts economy millions. … “It is costing our state tens of millions of [...]
One of the saddest stories about drug company influence on clinical trials and on the integrity of research is the story of Dr. Nancy Olivieri. In 2009, the American Association for the Advancement of Science gave her its award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility. AAAS wrote, at the time: In 1997, while conducting a clinical [...]
Read Bill Heisel’s column, “Journalists Bag a Big One: The American Pain Foundation.” Excerpt: The American Pain Foundation – an industry funded promoter of painkillers masquerading as a patient advocacy organization – closed its doors last week after it became the target of a U.S. Senate panel inquiry. The action by the U.S. Senate Finance [...]
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.
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