[NY TImes] Soon after I finished my surgical training, I worked with a young doctor who was impressive not only for his clinical skills but also for his devotion to patients. He was large and powerfully built but never seemed to loom over his patients, miraculously shrinking down to their eye level whenever he spoke [...]

[NYT] Pfizer hopes to introduce an over-the-counter version of Lipitor, the world’s best-selling drug, after it loses patent protection in November, a person close to the situation said Wednesday.
Selling a version of the drug to consumers without a prescription would allow Pfizer to retain some of the $11 billion in annual revenue that Lipitor has [...]

[MinnPost]- In July, the federal government proposed new rules governing the protection of human participants in medical studies.
But as University of Minnesota bioethics professor Carl Elliott notes in a commentary published Friday in the New York Times, those rules will do nothing to protect people who volunteer for medical studies from an unethical marketing ploy [...]

[The Economist] DRUG smugglers can expect harsh penalties nearly everywhere—if the drugs in question are heroin or cocaine. Those who smuggle counterfeit medicines, by contrast, have often faced lax enforcement and light punishment. Some governments deem drug-counterfeiting a trivial offence, little more than a common irritant. After all, whose spam filter does not groan with ads [...]

[NYT] When Juliet Jacobs found out she had lung cancer, she was terrified, but realized that her hope lay in getting the best treatment medicine could offer. So she got a second opinion, then a third. In February of 2010, she ended up at Duke University, where she entered a research study whose promise seemed [...]

[MassDevice] A new study alleges that Medtronic’s Infuse bone growth product causes excess bone growth in the spinal canal and researchers on the company payroll covered it up.
MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Medtronic Inc. (NYSE:MDT) faces new heat over the Infuse bone growth product, this time for allegations that the therapy caused excess bone growth in [...]

[New York Times] Alarmed by a shortage of primary care doctors, Obama administration officials are recruiting a team of “mystery shoppers” to pose as patients, call doctors’ offices and request appointments to see how difficult it is for people to get care when they need it.
The administration says the survey will address a “critical [...]

[FirstWord]- The US Department of Justice said Merck KGaA’s Serono unit agreed to pay $44.3 million to resolve allegations that it paid physicians to prescribe its multiple sclerosis drug Rebif (interferon beta-1a).
The investigation, which was spurred by a whistleblower lawsuit, suggested that the drugmaker paid for healthcare providers to attend various training meetings and conferences [...]

[First Word]- The US Supreme Court on Tuesday questioned whether Vermont’s decision to enact laws that prohibit the use of prescription drug records for marketing purposes violates free-speech rights. All states currently allow pharmacies to collect and pass on data about the prescription-writing habits of physicians, but Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire banned use or [...]

[WSJ]- Doctors weigh treatment options differently when they are deciding for themselves and when they are treating patients, according to a new study.
Doctors were more likely to opt for treatments with a higher chance of death—but lower risk of serious side effects—for themselves than for their patients in a survey of 940 primary-care physicians evaluating [...]