Making medicines safer for all of us
Adverse drug events are now the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals.
It’s a reasonable bet they are an even greater cause of death in non-hospital settings where there is no one to monitor things going wrong and no one to intervene to save a life. In mental health, for instance, drug-induced problems are the leading cause of death — and these deaths happen in community rather than hospital settings.
There is also another drug crisis — we are failing to discover new drugs. [Read more…]
From the blog…
You Say Retractable, We Say Intractable
δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν When the Peloponnesian War broke out in Greece 2,500 years ago between Athens and Sparta, the Athenians told the islanders living on Melos ‘you are either with us or against us’. Athens had created democracy, had all the famous philosophers, dramatists, politicians and control of the…
The Black Hole of Modernity
To be read in conjunction with A Human Touch. Thanks to Peter Selley, who found this Industry News, we who sail in RxISK now know we feature in an historical milestone. We had filed a Petition with FDA just under 8 years ago asking for Isotretinoin Labels to include mention of the enduring sexual dysfunction it…
Watch Out. Innocent Abroad
Very nearly 3 decades ago, I got involved in an American lawsuit. Forsyth v Eli Lilly Bill Forsyth was a wealthy man even before he sold the land his car rental business was on to Los Angeles airport. He and his wife, June, left Los Angeles for Maui in 1990, which as anyone who’s been…
Regulators Bearing Gifts
Last Wednesday, I had a letter from Michael Davis, the Acting Director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. It wasn’t a complete surprise to get a letter. I’d written to Dr Davis 3 weeks beforehand about MedDRA codes for PSSD and about PSSD more generally. But his letter was not a response to…
Grasping the Gene Genie
This image and one below is taken from the Sequencing.com website. Will Powers got his PFS patients to get Whole Genome Sequencing done through sequencing.com. He read the resulting information using gene.iobio. The ‘system’ – ‘powers-that-be’ is/are unhappy with developments like this for several reasons. One concern is that our genetic data may reveal risks…