Drug Companies

We Already Have Been Personalizing Medicine

By Jane Chin, Ph.D. Let’s take the trend of “personalized medicine” to start. Yes, gene-based and protein-based medicines sound alluring. We talk about targeted therapies like they’re silver bullets against deadly diseases, when we still don’t know of the long term effects of many small molecule and biologics as medicines. All that talk about personalized [...]

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Most Doctors Don’t Recommend Their Own Profession

Dan Abshear Lately in the media, others have said and expressed concern about the apparent shortage of primary care doctors, most notably. Typically, the main reason stated for this shortage is lack of pay of this particular specialty compared with others chosen by potential physicians. Yet considering the additional attention of shortages of students in [...]

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Provenge and FDA’s Etiology For Not Approving

By Dan Abshear Terminal patients are those who are not expected to live due to usually illness such as advanced prostate cancer (cT3). If the patient has 6 months or less to live, those patients are considered terminally ill. Regardless, if a patient is terminal, they are without a cure or tolerable treatment for their [...]

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Device Company Payouts Mostly Royalties

Regarding, “Device Companies Post How Much They Paid Orthopedic Surgeons” today’s Health Blog revealed that the millions of dollars paid to orthopedic surgeons are mostly in the form of royalty payments (74% of total payouts), at least, for Zimmer: Zimmer’s CFO broke down his company’s payments during a talk today at a Piper Jaffray health-care [...]

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Bullied by Pharma Co? Fax Senator Grassley

Doctors can now fax Senator Chuck Grassley at 202-228-2131 to report on drug companies that the doctors perceive to “push too far” and are being “bullied” by drug companies. Doctors can remain anonymous and send information by mail or fax. This effort came at the heels of the Avandia investigation earlier this year, where manufacturer [...]

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