David’s blog
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Change in Chicago: Boomerang 2In 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 […]
Change in Chicago: BoomerangWhen 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 […]
Change in Chicago: Whose Problem?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 part three in the Change in Chicago series covering the Dolin trial and its implications. Like part 1 it is written by Johanna Ryan – The Dolin Verdict and Playing Go. By twenty-first century American standards, Stu Dolin’s medical care was close to ideal. That’s a hard idea to swallow, given […]
Change in Chicago: Playing GoEditorial 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 […]
Change in Chicago: The Dolin VerdictEditorial: 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 […]
Where Does Change Come From?By the Rivers of Babylon Societies keep order. They have to. For millennia, religion has been key to achieving this. Religions may aspire to make men free and able to live a full life but they also embody a set of rules designed to keep chaos at bay. A Superego whose mission is to keep […]
Burn Baby BurnEditorial 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 […]
Tweeting while Medicine BurnsEditorial 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 […]
Tweeting While Psychiatry BurnsEditorial Note: This is part 1 of a lecture given at a British Neuropsychiatric Association meeting in London on February 22 under the heading of Psychopharmacology: 1952 – 2017. The lecture will feature here in 3 posts of which this is the first. Slides 1 -11 can be found HERE. The Birth This picture […]
Mickey Nardo: Tangled up in LifeMickey Nardo died yesterday. I got to visit with him and his wife Sharon on the phone a short while before he got involved with Jo Le Noury, Jon Jureidini, Melissa Raven, Catalin Tufanaru, Elia Abi-Jaoude and me Restoring Study 329 in 2013. It was one of those moments – I can still remember exactly […]
Generalists and PartialistsAn issue that crops up in comments on both this and the RxISK blog is the question of whether treatment would be safer if given by specialists (partialists) rather than general practitioners (generalists). We wouldn’t have the problems with antidepressants and antipsychotics for instance many people seem to think if prescribing was done by psychiatrists […]
VenomagnosiaEditorial 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 […]
SurrenderThere has been a big delay between posts. This has been primarily about trying to find an image or images for this post – unsuccessfully so far. The trigger to the post came from a piece on Surrendered Wives. The BBC website had the attached piece – strangely as part of their 100 Women series. […]
The First Vaccine WarsEditorial: 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 […]
File under Phile: Anecdotes are not ScienceEditorial 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 […]
Post-Truth Rumorology?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 […]
When the going gets tough, get a woman64 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 […]
Go Figure: Where Does All the Pain Come From?Editorial Note: This anonymous comment featured toward the end of the Murder or Accident post. It seemed worth transforming into a post in its own right. In the week of the US vote, a key question facing voters is where does all the pain come from. A colleague and I gave a talk to family […]
Study 329 Trick, Treat or TreximetThe plan this morning was to continue coverage of the Opioid Epidemic but perhaps because it is Halloween a link to a Wall Street Journal story on how Drug Makers Turn Cheap Generics into Expensive Pills arrived by email. It was difficult to resist. Here’s why. The article features Treximet, a combination of sumatriptan and naproxen, […]
Go Figure: Murder or Accident?Harold Shipman was a doctor in Britain, who was arrested for murder in 1998. He turned out to be a true Angel of Death, the most prolific known serial killer, who killed it is thought between two and three hundred of his patients by prescribing opioids in large doses. After his trial and conviction and […]
Go Figure: Study 329Editorial Note: This post merges the Go Figure sequence of posts from several weeks ago with the 329 series. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1968, the government was still tottering when on February 4 1970, sixteen miners died with twelve others maimed in an explosion at a mine in Lens in France. The […]
Study 329 Taper PhaseEditorial Note: It was tempting not to run a post today for fear it might get lost in the wash of the Clinton-Trump debate. But today is the fourteenth anniversary of the day FDA issued an approvable letter for Paxil for children, as well as the fifty-fourth anniversary of the 1962 FDA Act that created […]
Study 329 Continuation PhaseEditorial: We interrupt the Go Figure series of posts to return for two posts to Study 329. We will then return to Go Figure. All the fuss about Study 329 centers on its 8 week acute phase. But this study had a 24 week Continuation Phase that has never been published. Until Now. We might […]
Go Figure: A Geek TragedyIn 1939, in the laboratories of Geigy pharmaceuticals, Paul Mueller discovered that DichloroDiphenylTrichlorethane DDT killed insects more effectively that anything else then available. Robert Domenjoz, the later creator of imipramine, had the job of evaluating it. He did the testing on lice that was to make DDT one of the best-selling pharmaceuticals in the world. He […]
Go Figure on PerversityIn 1936, three workers at the Halowax Corporation in New York State, who had been working with chlorinated naphthalenes, developed chloracne – a skin condition that Viktor Yushenko’s face brought dramatically to world attention in 2004, when he was standing as the pro-Western candidate for the presidency of Ukraine. Chloracne can be caused by many […]
Go Figure: Digging for the Truth of InjuriesEditorial Note: In her comment, reproduced below, Sally was the person who best got to grips with what I was struggling with in last week’s post and this week’s and for the next few weeks. Drug induced injury is one sphere in which we get injured. Turning to other spheres may give us some ideas […]
Go Figure: The Silver Lining Clouds the ViewEditorial Note: Sally’s first Go Figure post with its 100 comments outlines the basic dilemma facing RxISK – how can anyone who has been injured by treatment get people who have not yet been injured to wake up. The next 5 – 10 posts will pick up various ways this dilemma has been answered over […]
Go Figure: Sally’s Problem with Whinging about MedicinesTwo weeks ago in response to the last post in the Study 329 series, Sally MacGregor added the comment – that features as a post below. It’s spot on. The problem is how to avoid being marginalized, becoming part of a 1%. How to capture the attention of the 99% for whom the meds work […]
Why Do People Sing?In 1989, BBC ran a program Under African Skies covering the music of the continent. The program and music from it captured on Cassette and later Record became widely known. On Side 2 of 4 sides of cassette, there is a brief snippet of 4 children at St Joseph’s Music School in Harare answering their […]
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