David’s blog

Some markers first. I am a committed believer in what may now be a last millennium concept – the medical model. I think antidepressants – the older tricyclics and ECT, not the more recent SSRI and other antidepressants – can save lives. I figure conflict of interest, crucially important in other areas of life, is of […]

Health Warning: Let me put down some markers before riffing on the Grassy Knoll theme. I am a committed believer in what may now be a last millenium concept – the medical model. I think antidepressants – the older tricyclics and ECT, not the more recent SSRI and other antidepressants – can save lives. I […]

Editorial Note: The image is of Science Media Centre funding from their website. This post links to Whats Going on Here, Honey I Shrunk the Shrinks, and to the two Prescription for Murder Posts on RxISK.   When AF’s email came in first, it seemed far from private as he now claims. The choice of […]

Editorial Note:  This arrived out of the blue. The list of those copied in makes it look like its anything but spontaneous. Simon Wessely is recently vacated president of Royal College of Psychiatrists, and one of the Trustees of the Science Media Centre.  Paul Summergrad and Jeff Lieberman are former presidents of APA.  JL offered […]

  Editorial Note: Prior to the Panorama program Prescription for Murder tonight,  a flurry of experts denounced the scaremongering. This didn’t just happen by accident.  The denunciation effort was also more intense than the pressure brought to bear on the original Panorama programs in 2002-2004. The change is in part down to the fact that […]

Editorial Note: This post continues a sequence of posts about well-intentioned efforts to produce change that may have produced the wrong change – see Boomerang and Boomerang 2. The contraceptive pill, the Pill, came into our lives in 1960. Almost immediately there were reports of young women with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolus […]

In 1983, the year before Henry Waxman got the Waxman-Hatch Act on the Statute Books he got the Orphan Drugs Act passed.  Here’s how it happened. In a wonderful 2016 self-publication, Abbey Meyer, a self-styled Connecticut housewife, outlines a story that began when her eldest son David was born in 1968.  The book is downloadable […]

When it comes to branded and generic drugs, the listing of key issues in this image misses a trick. The labels are identical. This lack of difference is a consequence of the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act which after two decades of dispute staked out a boundary between generic and branded pharmaceutical companies, part of which in […]

Courts are not a place you can make jokes. I started off with a confident pitch: If you owe a bank a million pounds, you have a problem but if you owe the bank a billion … I didn’t get much further.  It felt like several GSK lawyers popped up, addressing the judge with words […]

Editorial Note: This is a second post in the Change in Chicago Series looking at the Dolin trial and its verdict.  There will be two more in the series.  Being cross-examined in a legal case involving Pharma is rarely fun.  The lawyers will have done their homework in spades.  As one of them put it […]

Editorial: This series of posts on Stewart Dolin’s death interrupts a series on how to bring about change . This is not inappropriate as law suits are one of the few ways to bring about change. This post in the series is by a Chicagoan – Johanna Ryan who has been tracking the case since […]

Editorial Note: This is the third part of a talk giving to the BNPA on February 22.  It follows on from Tweeting While Psychiatry Burns and Tweeting While Medicine Burns.  The final group of slides are HERE.  The talk you have just heard was first given in Toronto on Thursday November 30 2000 to mark […]

Editorial Note: This is part 2 of a 3 part lecture given on February 22 that began with Tweeting while Psychiatry Burns.  The text and slides continue from last week. The slides for this part are Here. The numbering continues from last week.  When his office was ransacked, Delay’s world was turned upside down but […]

Editorial Note: I was asked to review Peter Kramer’s Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants for ISIS.  The in print review is HERE.  There is a sister post on RxISK – with a better cartoon and where the word Venomagnosia s explained – Come Back When you Have a Medical Degree. This book was very […]

Editorial: This is a final post in the current vaccine series. In 1798 Edward Jenner in Britain demonstrated that vaccination with cowpox was a safer way to confer immunity to smallpox than variolation with smallpox. It quickly spread. In Britain, variolation was banned in favor of vaccination in 1840. In 1853, vaccinations were made compulsory […]

Editorial Note: The Post-Truth Rumorology post attracted a comment by Annie that deserves featuring. She cites a really good Daily Mail article in which Melinda Messenger talks about intervening when her daughter is scheduled to have the HPV vaccine. The DM article drew this response from Dr. David Robert Grimes – a physicist at the University of […]

Stopping the spread of Japan’s antivaccine panic Following the post last week on MedWatcher Japan’s efforts to bring the issue of HPV vaccines to light, my attention was drawn to a recent Wall Street Journal article which stated: “Japanese women’s health is increasingly at risk as public-health policy is driven by conspiracy theories, misguided political interference and […]

64 women to sue in 3 Japanese courts over health woes from cervical cancer vaccines A group of lawyers for 64 women who are suffering health problems from cervical cancer vaccines said Tuesday the victims will file damages lawsuits against the government and two drug makers that produced the vaccines through four district courts on […]