Tags: pharmaceuticals
Blog Posts (30)
May 14, 2012
AJOB: An Independent Journal
It has been implied by Carl Elliott and William Heisel that it has ever been claimed that “financial links between the Center for Practical Bioethics, AJOB and Purdue Pharma” exist and that “what reporters may find is that the center is tied up” with AJOB.…
Oct 04, 2011
A Duty to Report Dead Ends?
When an investigational agent is being studied by pharma, is there an ethical responsibility to disclose the findings of that research, even if the agent is no longer being studied or being brought to market?…
Aug 11, 2011
Drug Shortages Hurt Man....and His Best Friend
When a reproductive oncologist in our clinical ethics certificate program did a presentation on drug shortages in oncology last month, I thought perhaps this was just a highly specialized problem.…
Sep 13, 2010
Guinea-Pigging: It's Not A Real Word, But It's A Real-World Phenomenon
Watch to see the story of “The Life of a Professional Guinea Pig” courtesy of TIME.
Spencer, or as I would describe him a walking human pin cushion (shown below), tells his story of being a healthy volunteer for Phase I research.…
Jan 25, 2010
"Extraordinary Messiness"
Hollywood has taken up orphan diseases before–remember “Lorenzo’s Oil”? And bioethics movies generally have been increasingly common, even just in the last year.…
Nov 02, 2009
Q & A on What is a Blockbuster Anti-Wrinkle Cream Worth, Morally Speaking Or How Many Fetuses Does It Take To Make a Great Cosmeceutical
Question: What is it worth to produce a blockbuster anti-wrinkle cream?
Hypothetical Answer from Cosmeceutical Company: A single skin biopsy of a 14-week old voluntarily aborted fetus from a minor with consent from her parents.…
Jul 21, 2009
Keeping Your Skin Youthful, The Stem Cell Way
Stem cells are, apparently, all the rage in the world of cosmetics. Slather them on your face to keep your face young and ageless or to simply make yourself more beautiful on your eyes, cheeks, or lips.…
May 18, 2009
Lose Your Job, Keep Your Drugs
According to Judith Graham at the Chicago Tribune’s Triage blog, Pfizer has created a new program to allow the unemployed–and thus uninsured–to keep access to their prescription drugs for one year.…
May 01, 2009
Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal
It’s a safe guess that somewhere at Merck today someone is going through the meeting minutes of the day that the hair-brained scheme for the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was launched, and that everyone who was in the room is now going to be fired.…
Jan 14, 2009
Direct-to-Consumer Ads Fail to Direct Many Consumers
According to MSNBC, direct-to-consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals are cluttering the airwaves with offers to cure Americans of their bipolar disorder, irritable bowel disease, sleeplessness, acid reflux, high cholesterol and more.…
Published Articles (1)
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 11 Issue 6 - Jun 2011
It's Time for Bioethics to See Chronic Pain as an Ethical Issue Myra J. Christopher
News (12)
May 17, 2012
Compassionate use gives lifeline to needy patients (SF Gate)
A Florida mother made an impassioned video plea. Dying of breast cancer, she asked South San Francisco drugmaker Genentech and federal regulators to grant her compassionate use of a new drug that is not expected to be approved until next month.
May 14, 2012
IOM calls for more thorough safety monitoring of drugs (American Medical News)
To track a medicine’s safety, the FDA should create a comprehensive benefit and risk assessment and management plan that is readily accessible to the public and easy to understand, according to the report, issued May 1. Such a document would give physicians and others greater access to information about drugs on the market than they had in the past, said Eric M. Meslin, PhD, a member of the 12-person IOM committee that wrote the report.
May 08, 2012
One in eight teens misuses prescription painkillers (Chicago Tribune)
Both medical and recreational use of such opioid drugs has increased across the United States over the past couple of decades, as have deaths due to painkiller overdoses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 14,800 Americans died of an opioid overdose in 2008 — three times the number of overdose deaths 20 years earlier.
May 01, 2012
Better Ways Needed to Track Drug Safety: Report (US News)
A management plan to gather, assess and respond to data about all medications’ risks from the time they are approved until they are no longer on the market is needed to improve drug safety in the United States, says an Institute of Medicine report released Tuesday.
Apr 30, 2012
Drug shortages leave healthcare providers foraging for vital medicines (The Star-Ledger)
During the past year, there have been troubling shortages of medicines, including older but still critical cancer drugs such as Doxil, Taxol and Methotrexate — an old chemotherapy drug now used primarily to treat children with leukemia. The reasons for the shortages, which began nearly four years ago and have grown more severe, range from manufacturing problems that have shut down suppliers and shortages of raw materials to pure economics — in some cases, pharmaceutical companies are choosing to stop making medicines that are no longer profitable.
Apr 24, 2012
Dying Mom Posts Video for Compassionate Use; Company Agrees (ABC News)
Social media proved to be one powerful tool for a mother dying of breast cancer and desperate to get a drug that has yet to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration… Gant, 46, posted the video on YouTube as an attempt to plead with the FDA to allow her to use a trial drug known as pertuzumab under compassionate use. The FDA is expected to approve the drug, developed by Genentech, on June 8. But Gant doesn’t expect to live that long.
Apr 12, 2012
States Seek Curb on Patient Bills for Costly Drugs (New York Times)
Spurred by patients and patient advocates like Ms. Kuhn, lawmakers in at least 20 states, from Maine to Hawaii, have introduced bills that would limit out-of-pocket payments by consumers for expensive drugs used to treat diseases like cancer,rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and inherited disorders.
Apr 11, 2012
Tamiflu: Full reports from trials should be public and regulators respond to Tamiflu recommendations (EurekAlert)
The full clinical study reports of drugs that have been authorized for use in patients should be made publicly available in order to allow independent re-analysis of the benefits and risks of such drugs, according to leading international experts who base their assertions on their experience with Tamiflu (oseltamivir). Tamiflu is classed by the World Health Organization as an essential drug and many countries have stockpiled the anti-influenza drug at great expense to taxpayers.
Mar 26, 2012
FDA Told to Act on Farm Antibiotics (Wall Street Journal)
A federal judge ordered the Food and Drug Administration to restart a process that could limit the use of two types of antibiotics in cattle, pigs and poultry, amid concerns such use leads to antibiotic-resistant infections in humans.
Mar 22, 2012
A Drumbeat on Profit Takers (NY Times)
Dr. Angell has drawn a similar response for her intensely critical focus on the pharmaceutical industry. She traces it to the late 1980s, when manuscripts she edited for The New England Journal testified, she says, to the “new power and influence of pharma” over studies validating its products. Instead of standing back while impartial scientists evaluated drugs, manufacturers were suddenly involved in every aspect of the process. Dr. Angell says she vetted manuscripts that omitted any mention of a drug’s side effects, and studies that were weighted to make a drug look good; she repeatedly heard about studies never submitted for publication because they made a drug look bad.