Pharmaceutical Industry

Drive too fast along Red Lion Road, beside Philadelphia's Northeast Airport, and you will miss the low-rise cement building where the biotech company MedImmune has been quietly pumping out swine flu vaccine at about a million doses a week. Through the summer and fall, workers wearing protective gear that covered them from head to toe brewed up batches of live, genetically modified flu virus. Robots then injected tiny doses of virus-laden fluid into glass vials, which were mounted into nasal spritzers, labeled, and readied for shipment at the… more

The man who would be known as Patient No. 1 emerged from routine open-heart surgery at Columbia University Medical Center in stable condition. Then he began to bleed uncontrollably. Surgeons rushed him back to the operating room to reopen his chest, but by the time they could stop the hemorrhaging, Patient No. 1 was barely breathing and in a coma.

On Aug. 15, 2000, shortly before he was discharged on his way to a nursing home, a physician wrote a… more

The public's faith in President Barack Obama's plan for health care reform is fading. Proposals ranging from the public insurance option to reimbursing physicians for end-of-life counseling are mired in a debate that's as overheated as August temperatures. Even the seemingly self-evident idea that the nation has a moral duty to make sure all citizens have basic access to health care is up for grabs. But there's one aspect of health care reform that California voters support almost universally: better medical evidence.

It's no secret that the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world. We spend nearly twice as much per person as do other developed countries for health outcomes that are no better and in some cases much worse. Moreover, the citizens of most other countries, including Canada and the U.K., who are routinely reviled by opponents of "socialized" medicine, express greater satisfaction with their health care systems than we do with ours.

Suzanne Bull always half expected that she'd get cancer. After all, she lived in Marin County, California, where breast cancer rates are among the highest in the country. Still, she was determined to do whatever she could to protect herself. She ate right and exercised, and every year, she went into San Francisco to get a mammogram.

But some, like Shannon Brownlee, author of “Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer,” question the revenue-driven prescribathon. Should drugs “that may have a really serious side effect called suicide,” be used for simple knee ...

Shannon Brownlee discusses her new book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer on NBC affiliate WSCH6. LINK to video

Journalists often forget that conflicts of interest may bias the opinions of their expert sources. Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee explain how, in an attempt to disentangle commercial messages from science, they have compiled a list of nearly 100 independent medical experts to whom reporters can turn.

Ho hum, another medical scandal in the news. Earlier this month US Senator Chuck Grassley announced his intention to investigate Alan Schatzberg, chairman of the psychiatry department at Stanford University and the incoming president of the American Psychiatric Association, about his… more

..."I think the question is, should one drug compound do so much?" said Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer.

"This is a drug that may have a really serious side effect called suicide," Brownlee said. "Don't we have other drugs available that are safer and just as effective for such things as the management of chronic knee and low back pain?"... LINK