Subscribe in a reader
Subscribe by email
Half of the top 50 academic medical centres in the United States have no policies on their staff ghostwriting research on the behalf of pharmaceutical companies – including UCLA and Mayo Medical School. Medical ghostwriting is “the practice of pharmaceutical companies secretly authoring journal articles published under the byline of academic researchers.” By getting academics [...]
The BMJ has just published a whole slew of papers about Tamiflu (oseltamivir) – a key drug in the public health response against swine flu (influenza A/H1N1). The linchpin is a Cochrane review on the efficacy of neuraminidase inhibitors – namely zanamivir (Relenza; Glaxo Wellcome) and oseltamivir (Tamiflu; Roche) – for preventing and treating influenza [...]
The links between the pharmaceutical industry and doctors are many and tangled. Drug companies are keen to schmooze doctors and, directly or not, persuade clinicians to prescribe their drug instead of a similar one by a competitor. One way that drug companies try to influence doctors is by sponsoring events, such as conferences or lectures. [...]
A new study published in Annals of Internal Medicine has shown that adding a simple fact box to adverts for prescription drugs considerably improves consumer awareness of the risks and benefits of the medication. In this study, people who examined an advert with a drug fact box were more likely to choose the most efficacious [...]
Last week the US Food and Drug Administration ruled that the pharmaceutical industry could promote drugs for uses that haven’t been cleared by the regulatory body. The new FDA guidelines permit the “dissemination of medical journal articles and medical or scientific reference publications on unapproved uses of drugs and medical devices.” In order to be [...]
There’s a lot of interesting chatter around at the moment about pharmaceutical industry funding of Continuing Medical Education (CME) for physicians. Qualified doctors are expected to keep up to date with the latest research and treatments in their field by completing educational activities, which generally take the form of quizzes that participants must complete having [...]
Pharmaceutical company drug adverts can be so cheesy or so bizarre, hence they lend themselves very well to spoofs and satire. In the wake of the hilarious online drug name generators (Drug-O-Matic, The Prescription Drug Name Generator and The New Drug Generator to name a few), a website to generate an advert for your own [...]