Americans for Drug and Device Accountability (ADDA) and Justice in Michigan (JIM) have announced their consolidation into a single organization dedicated to fighting FDA preemption in the drug and device arenas, and on both the state and national levels. Their updated website is http://pharmaccountability.org/.
“Congress did not intend FDA oversight to be the exclusive means of ensuring drug safety and effectiveness” – Justice John Paul Stevens
Wyeth, Drugmakers Lose as Top U.S. Court Allows Suits (Update1)
By Greg Stohr
March 4 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Supreme Court bolstered patient lawsuits against drugmakers, upholding a $7 million award to [...]
In this week’s bmj there is an article by Thomas Jefferson of the Cochrane Vaccine Institute (“Relation of study quality, concordance, take home message, funding, and impact in studies of influenza vaccines: systematic review“) whom I have often quoted before (“Flu Shots are for Idiots“) regarding the dubious evidence behind policy recommendations [...]
An article from the Jan. 3 2009 issue of The Lancet used a meta analysis to show that so-called first generation antipsychotics (FGAs) and second generation antipsychotics (SGAs) are not that much different in terms of efficacy, safety, and side effect profiles. The purported superiority of SGAs for negative symptoms and fewer side effects for SGAs were primarily the results of comparator studies that put them up against high dose haloperidol.
This has been quite a year for disturbing revelations about the corruption of the medical literature by pharmaceutical company interests. I wrote previously about ghost writing by Merck and others, and how papers were produced by drug companies that said “insert author here” and then they went out and shopped around for an author [...]
I remember one time sitting out on the deck of my family’s house on Puget Sound talking to my father and my brother and telling them that the people in academic psychiatry didn’t have a sense of humour and they told me I should work in a different field. That seemed extreme to me at [...]
