Pharmaceutical Industry

Shannon Brownlee in the Indianapolis Star | 'One Drug, Many Uses. Good idea?'

Communications — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:34:00 -0400

New America in the News:

..."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

Stealth Marketers

Ron Tang — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:11:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, devoted listeners of National Public Radio were treated to an episode of the award-winning radio series The Infinite Mind called "Prozac Nation: Revisited." The segment featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide. In their considered opinions, all four said that worries about the drugs have been overblown.

The radio show, which was broadcast nationwide and paid for in part by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, had the air of quiet, authoritative credibility. Host Dr. Fred Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of… more

Knowing Me, Knowing You

Ron Tang — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 02:09:00 -0400

Do you want to Google your genes or peer into your future risks of heart disease or cancer? Now you can, according to direct to consumer testing companies. Gone are the days when genetic testing was limited to doctors ordering tests for rare, but prognostically potent, single gene disorders such as Huntington’s disease, Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, or cystic fibrosis. Thanks to an explosion of newly discovered single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced snips), companies are marketing genetic tests for traits ranging from the mundane -- eye colour and wet ear wax -- to serious conditions such as Crohn’s disease and… more

Big Pharma's Golden Eggs

Ron Tang — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 05:25:00 -0400

Once upon a time there was an industry called pharma that was interested in doing well and doing good. Run by doctors and chemists, drug companies employed battalions of researchers whose scientific efforts resulted by mid-century in a flood of life-saving drugs, including antibiotics, vaccines, tranquilizers, antihistamines and steroids. As George Merck, president of the company founded by his father, put it in 1950, "We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow... "

And how. Today, of course, drug companies are hugely profitable enterprises and the darlings of both… more

Let's Stop Running Scared

Ron Tang — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 06:49:00 -0400

Felt a little short of breath the other day, walking up a hill. Uh-oh. A nugget of worry lodged for a moment in my mind. At 50-something, I'm in decent enough shape. I don't smoke. I walk several miles most days, and I can still beat my 40-something friend at tennis. Not exactly a candidate for a heart attack. But still. I've read all those stories about women like me, the ones with no risk factors for cardiac disease who were suddenly hit with an attack.

Maybe you've had the same worries -- wondered whether some sharp little twinge was heartburn… more

An Untold Story?

Ron Tang — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

New generation antidepressants aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. That seems to be the central message in the meta-analysis published this week by Irving Kirsch and colleagues in PLoS Medicine,[1] and it was this message that made the headlines. Kirsch’s conclusion follows on the heels of similar studies showing that statins are useful in only a small subset of patients taking the drugs[2] and earlier studies finding that the safety and performance of cyclo-oxygenase-2 (COX 2) inhibitors were worse than they first seemed.[3] All of which further reinforces previous criticisms that regulators in the United Kingdom and the United… more

Newtered

Articles — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:36:00 -0400

If you’ve never suffered the agony of low back pain, don’t worry -- chances are you will. About two-thirds of adults are hit with low back pain at some time in their lives, and for many the pain is sufficiently unbearable to send them hobbling into the doctor’s office. Yet although back pain is one of the most common conditions around, and although it costs billions of dollars each year in lost productivity, doctors still disagree over everything from how to diagnose the cause to what to do about it. The vast majority of low back pain -- even the… more

Overtreated

adminn — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 23:00:00 -0400

Is a CT scan always necessary after your child suffers a bump on the head? Should you think twice before undergoing surgery for lower back pain? Are your elderly parents going to be allowed to die at home, or will they spend their last few weeks in a hospital, hooked up to machines and tubes, subjected to painful, unnecessary procedures?

These are the kinds of questions you may find yourself asking once you’ve read Overtreated. Each year, our medical system delivers an enormous amount of care that does nothing… more

NPR Interviews Shannon Brownlee on Drug Marketing and the Press

Communications — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:22:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Shannon Brownlee discusses direct-to-consumer drug marketing and the media...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do the drug companies make use of the press?

SHANNON BROWNLEE: Let me answer the question by kind of going at it from the perspective of the media, who are bombarded with information from a variety of sources.

One of those sources is The National Sleep Foundation, which sends out its poll and wants us to write about the results of that poll.

Number two, we get information from universities. So one of the places that did some of the research on [the sleep drug] Lunesta was Duke, and what Duke’s P.R. office did is it offered the press a patient who said Lunesta was the greatest thing that ever happened to her, and it offered up a researcher, a Dr. Andrew Krystal.

And it turns out that Dr. Krystal is paid by the company that makes Lunesta, and the press is offered these people as if it's all coming completely independently out of Duke University. So then a bunch of people wrote stories on Lunesta based on that press release...

To listen to the complete story, please click on the attachment below or visit On The Media's web site.

Shannon Brownlee in BusinessWeek on Drug Companies

Communications — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:26:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...Some drug industry critics are not so surprised that advertising oversight has slackened. "The question is whether the industry has gotten better at complying with the rules or the FDA has gotten worse at enforcing them. It's probably a combination of the two," says Shannon Brownlee, author of the new book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer...

The book describes how the industry fought the FDA to loosen ad restrictions on the basis of free speech, taking the battle all the way to the Supreme Court, and has since exploited the agency's rather lax rules to exert an unprecedented amount of marketing muscle. "The FDA has been beaten down by the drug industry," Brownlee says. And to great effect: Every dollar the drug industry spends on DTC advertising generates $4.20 in increased sales, Brownlee writes, outpacing the return of even the fast-food industry, which spends a similar amount on consumer advertising. Will those seeking to muzzle drug ads just give up? Don't count on it. Says study co-author Donohue, "As long as direct-to-consumer [advertising] is around and there are concerns about drug safety, there will be efforts to restrict it..."

For the complete article, please visit BusinessWeek's web site.