David’s blog

Editorial Note: Its an Irish custom to offer one for the road.  Having finished the trilogy on Outsourcing Fascism, here’s one for the road. A little over two years ago I wrote two posts – Little Red Riding Hood and Little Red Stethoscope that give me pleasure today – but also make me worry about […]

Editorial Note:  This is part three in a sequence of posts that began with Outsourcing Fascism and continued last week with Not Our Nomination.  Our Nomination The RxISK nomination for the SAS JM Prize is Lisa Rosenbaum from the Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. Dr Rosenbaum has courageously stood up for the mainstream of […]

Editorial Note: This post continues from Outsourcing Fascism.  For more on James Coyne, see Rolf Harris to James Coyne.   Coyne was the perfect candidate for a Sense about Science JM Prize until a few years ago.  He was the first to wade in and rubbish anyone who might have thought there was something wrong with […]

  In 2017 the Sense about Science (SAS) John Maddox (JM) Prize was awarded to to Riko Muranaka for her efforts to counter apparent misinformation about the HPV vaccine. MedWatcher Japan are the group who have helped raise the profile of concerns about the HPV vaccine in Japan. When it comes to tackling the adverse […]

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads; And […]

Editorial Note: In Pandemonium and Pandemrix the question was when and what basis is it possible to agree with an obviously smart women, as AM is, that there must be a link between the Pandemrix she was given and  the narcolepsy she ended up with.  No one really tackled this head on. The answer has […]

Editorial Note: At the heart of RxISK is the idea that if something goes wrong for you on some medication you are the person best placed to know if there is an issue.  But again and again when people raise a problem they find they are invalidated – nonsense, rubbish, its your illness or whatever.   […]

Its the end of October when every Irish person going back millennia  gets taken over by Halloween – not just the Celts, those who come and stay get bitten too, as Bram Stoker could tell you. So there will be a series of 4 posts to mark the occasion, starting next week, previewed here.  These […]

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a pretty harrowing movie.  In brief a new SS Kommandant and his family come to a camp.  The Kommandant seems like a reasonable man.  His family seem very normal. His son makes friends with a boy behind the wire. They ultimately create a hole in the fence between […]

                   Editorial Note: When I raised the specter of the Science Media Center and Sense about Science recently, some of the Americans I knew fell about laughing, figuring we are still a long way off being as censored as the US of A is. After calming down, […]

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 […]