As a rule I doesn’t usually re-post blog entries, however this one by pharmamkting  is an interesting read. ——
[pharmamkting] That’s my takeaway from this comment by Marijn Dekkers, “outspoken” head of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, in which he not only disses patients but claims to have cured cancer!
“If you have cancer, you get a pharmaceutical product, and your cancer [...]

 
[Economist] TWENTY years ago North America, Europe and Japan produced almost all of the world’s science. They were the aristocrats of technical knowledge, presiding over a centuries-old regime. They spent the most, published the most and patented the most. And what they produced fed back into their industrial, military and medical complexes to push forward [...]

[theGuardian] Hopes of controlling malaria in Africa could be wrecked by criminals who are circulating counterfeit and substandard drugs, threatening millions of lives, scientists are warning.

They are calling for public health authorities to take urgent action to preserve the efficacy of the anti-malarials now being used in the worst-hit areas of the continent.
There has been [...]

[The Wall Street Journal] The procedure starts with a surgeon drilling two holes in the patient’s skull. “Every bone and tooth in my head was rattling,” says Lisa Battiloro, who was awake, but not in pain, during the eight-hour operation.
Neurologists asked her questions and issued commands as they pinpointed the exact spot in her brain for [...]

[The New York Times]To head off medical conflicts of interest, the Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment.
Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use [...]

[Washington Post /AP]  The Food and Drug Administration would collect hundreds of millions of dollars in new fees from pharmaceutical companies to help speed up the review of generic drugs, under an agreement with industry released by the agency on Friday.
The user fee proposal is one of three such agreements that the agency is submitting [...]

[pharmPro] Basel- Novartis Consumer Health Inc. (NCH) informed customers, that it is voluntarily recalling all lots of select bottle packaging configurations from retailers of Excedrin® and NoDoz® products with expiry dates of December 20, 2014 or earlier as well as Bufferin® and Gas-X Prevention® products with expiry dates of December 20, 2013 or earlier, in [...]

[medpagetoday] Drug research, even from clinical trials sponsored by the federal government, routinely is suppressed, harming patients and increasing healthcare costs, according to a series of reports published by BMJ.
“The current situation is a disservice to research participants, patients, health systems, and the whole endeavor of clinical medicine,” according to an editorial published with [...]

[NYTimes] ChemGenex Pharmaceuticals found out the hard way how important it is to have a trustworthy companion.

 The Food and Drug Administration last year rejected the company’s drug to treat a subset of leukemia patients whose tumors had a particular genetic mutation. The main problem was not the drug itself, the agency said. Rather, ChemGenex had [...]

[amenews] Medical practices generally earn less giving a single shot that protects against five diseases than injecting component immunizations separately, even though the same amount of counseling time is often required for combination shots as single vaccinations, according to a study.