The genius of Henry Ford was in his perfection of mass production. Ford’s assembly lines produced oodles of Model T, with economies of scale so that the cost of each car fell to the point that even those working in those lines could afford them. His method was copied by other car manufacturers and ultimately by other industries as well.
The pharmaceutical industry was one of them. The industry mass produces …
I have a solo outpatient private practice focusing on psychiatric medication management and brief therapy for adults. Early on, I decided to accept insurance to help address the shortage of psychiatrists in this country. Because of the advances in telemedicine since the pandemic, I can see patients throughout the state where I am licensed. This should be the happiest time in my career. After several years of working as an …
The United States and Canada started a movement that began as medical cannabis and quickly exploded into adult-use cannabis markets. However, the North American operators failed to properly regulate the processes from growing to manufacturing to compete in a global pharmaceutical-level market. Europe has taken the lead as the heavy-weight producer of truly medical-grade pharmaceutical cannabis flowers and products. Notably, many operators in the U.S. and Canada claim to produce …
Who among us as physicians and prescribers, not to mention the millions of families who have been affected and suffered deep personal loss due to the current crisis and record overdose deaths, regardless of whether the opioid was legally written or illicit.
Let’s take a step back in time and review. As physicians, how have we been duped? Now the CDC has come up with recent new guidelines on opioid prescribing …
Patients may find themselves caught in the middle between their health insurance company and their oncologist when it comes to selecting the drugs used to treat their cancer. Why is this?
The American Cancer Society explains biologic drugs (derived from living organisms such as yeast, bacteria, or animal cells) and biosimilar drugs, which behave similarly to the original, patented (i.e., brand) drug. It is important to note that biosimilar drugs are …
Driving around, searching for children’s Tylenol and a pharmacy that had the antibiotics my son needed, was not how I wanted to spend the holidays. I am not alone – shelves are bare, and antibiotics are in short supply as we head into the new year in the midst of a triple threat of COVID-19, flu, and RSV.
While this drug shortage is incredibly frustrating, at least there is …
An excerpt from Inside The Orphan Drug Revolution: The Promise of Patient-Centered Biotechnology.
Pre-revolutionary stirrings
Every revolution rises up against an order in need of reform. For the orphan drug revolution, that order was the pharmaceutical industry of the 1970s. Most pharma companies had been founded by entrepreneurial chemists or pharmacists decades …
“Fentanyl Vaccine a Potential ‘Game Changer’ for Opioid Crisis,” declares a Medscape headline.
“Fentanyl Vaccine Delivers Promising Results in Trial,” reports an industry website.
“A Vaccine Against Deadly Fentanyl Might Be Near,” promises US News & World Report.
Only the fourth headline I encounter puts the news into proper perspective: “New Fentanyl Vaccine …
Less than a year ago, a position paper/meta-analysis was published whose authors concluded that the pain reliever acetaminophen, and products containing this compound, were contraindicated in pregnancy as they could result in premature or stillborn births or developmental defects. Earlier studies appeared more positive and resulted in recommendations for its use by professional and governmental organizations. The present authors acknowledged this disjunction and made both the routine recommendations for further …
Psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) represents one of the most promising developments in psychiatry in decades. The treatment typically involves the infusion of a compound such as LSD, psilocybin, or MDMA during an extended therapy session with licensed professionals.
Although it lacks widespread regulatory approval or clinical use, significant advances have been made in the study of PAT in the past decade, with a pronounced increase in recent years. Recently, a Read more…
Everyone knows the terrible toll the opioid epidemic takes on our society. It doesn’t matter where you live and how wealthy or educated you are, no one is immune. I watched as a colleague tried to help a child struggling with addiction, spending countless hours of worry and thousands of dollars, only to have the child succumb to an accidental opioid overdose. The emotional and financial cost on individuals and …
It’s a public health win that on October 19th, an FDA Advisory Committee voted 14-1 to remove Makena, a drug intended to prevent preterm birth, from the market. The FDA usually follows the advice of its advisory committee, and the briefing documents it supplied the committee make it clear that the agency wants the drug off the market. As well it should. Makena doesn’t work.
After a preliminary trial showed that …
The American Cancer Society released its annual report on cancer statistics, showing that we have made clear and significant progress in treating numerous forms of cancer. The overall rate of death has declined steadily since 1991, translating to over 3 million lives saved.
Despite this progress, I still see room for improvement in a care model where patients too often slip through the cracks.
The National Cancer Institute identified that …
You’ve been swallowing things your entire life: breast milk (or formula), food––maybe a marble or small Lego. But did you know that swallowing pills is different?
Let’s start with how not to swallow a pill.
Sorry, but Bruce Willis in all five Die Hard movies is incorrect. You don’t just take a small handful of aspirin, toss them into your mouth, and jerk your head back while swallowing.
Not to mention, if you have …
Since the development of antibiotics in the 1940s, patients presenting with an infection could be expected to respond quickly to a prescribed course of antibiotics by their physician. While the antibiotic prescription model has helped countless lives, this paradigm has degraded over time due to the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The net impact is a global health crisis, worsened by continuing the over-prescription and misuse of antibiotics.
The more drugs …
I wondered whether to recommend Nuedexta for my elderly relative with worsening Alzheimer’s disease and daily spontaneous crying. Often she would deny feeling sad and couldn’t account for her sobbing. Avanir Pharmaceuticals released Nuedexta in 2010 to treat pseudobulbar affect: involuntary emotional outbursts due to certain neurologic conditions or brain injury. I wasn’t sure if these crying bouts qualified as pseudobulbar affect. But my biggest hesitation was the breathtaking …
The twice-vaxxed, twice-boosted First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, tested negative for COVID after taking Paxlovid. And then she rebounded, just like her husband did weeks ago or like Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief Medical Advisor to the president Anthony Fauci did in June or like the 1 to Read more…
In the mid-1980s, with the AIDS epidemic on the horizon, austere conservative Margaret Thatcher sanctioned the first needle exchanges in the U.K. to prevent the budgetary burden that HIV might otherwise have become on the National Health Service. Nearly forty years later, New York City opened its first supervised injection sites in November of 2021, where intravenous drug users inject their substances of choice under the watchful eye …
While cancer has been around for decades, the fight for survival and treatment options are still very top of mind. Treatment is simply playing catch up. We continue to try and get rid of the disease that has already infiltrated one’s body rather than catching it before it develops. We need to shift the focus from therapeutics that fight the disease to ways we can catch it before the deterioration …
Early in my addiction medicine fellowship, I met a patient for the second time while shadowing another physician in their practice. The patient was a former nurse with opioid use disorder on maintenance therapy with buprenorphine (commonly called Suboxone, the original brand name of a formulation combined with naloxone), a partial opioid agonist that is FDA-approved for the treatment of opioid use disorder and can be conveniently prescribed in the …
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
