In the words of the late soccer great Pelé spoofed on Saturday Night Live, women’s health has been “very, very good” for drug makers. In 2002, 61 million prescriptions were written for women in the U.S. for hormones to treat the so-called “disease” of menopause (which was once treated with electroshock therapy—yes, ECT).
Until the government-sponsored Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) found in 2002 that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) …
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At least two million people in the United States are incarcerated in 122 United States prisons. Little is known about the prisoners themselves. Did their background condemn them to bad behavior? Or did they just make grievous mistakes? Do they suffer from a mental illness masquerading as criminal behavior? Can they change their life path? A mental health specialist with 25 years of direct …
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An interview with David Quamman, author of Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus.
Rosenberg: After the publication of your 2012 book Spillover, in which the scientists you interviewed talked about expecting the “next big one,” I was surprised more people didn’t say, “Quammen told us so.”
Quammen: Actually, in Jan 2020 [as COVID-19 hit], I immediately got calls asking me how “I knew” this was going to …
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It is too early to hear the narratives from the families of the 19 children slain this week at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, near San Antonio, Texas. But narratives from the 1993 Long Island Rail Road shooting, the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, and 16 other deadly gun violence events have just been published by Red Penguin books. From Bullet to Bullhorn is the …
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An interview with Rich DiPentima, MPH, former chief of communicable disease epidemiology at the New Hampshire Division of Public Health.
Rosenberg: As the former chief of communicable disease epidemiology at the New Hampshire Division of Public Health and deputy public health director in Manchester, NH, you wrote an op-ed a few months ago that compared COVID-19 with previous pandemics. Can you elaborate?
Dipentima: With smallpox, the only reservoir was …
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In 2017, Allergan CEO Brent Saunders promised to reign in drug price hikes, and other Pharma companies followed suit. In 2021, it looks like all bets are off.
In August, Amgen raised the price of its psoriasis med Otezla by 2.4 percent after raising the price of its oncology biologic Mvasi and chronic kidney disease med Parsabiv by 3 percent, reports FiercePharma. Merck similarly Read more…
Even as COVID-19 is found in apes, big cats, minks, domestic cats, other small mammals, and now in U.S. deer, some don’t want to let go of the insultingly simplistic “lab leak” theory. Do they really think the 1918 influenza and AIDS pandemics (or Ebola, MERS, and SARS ) needed lab mendacity to exist? We won’t even talk about the prehistorical plagues!
Giving COVID-19 political not animal origins ignores its disturbing …
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Many drug ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would offend today.
In an ad for Valium, we are told that the woman pictured (“Jan”) is “psychoneurotic” because she is unmarried at age 35. “You probably see many such Jans in your practice,” says the ad—“The unmarrieds with low self-esteem. Jan never found a man to measure up to her father.”
Valium was …
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“How dare you suggest I/my son is not sick?” “Stop invalidating the lived experiences of millions of people!” “Able-bodied people like you have no right to report this.” “How dare you suggest my medication has risks?” “You’re not taking my drugs!”
The tweets above are just some of the vehement responses I have received as a health reporter over the years for daring to report that some drugs have a downside …
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It is a macabre fact. The easing of COVID shutdowns has brought back mass shootings in the U.S. With almost no packed schools, movie theaters, malls, airports, and fewer packed workplaces during the last year, mass shootings did not lead the news. Now they are back.
This month’s shootings at Atlanta spas and at a Boulder, Colorado grocery store have jolted the nation back into the banality and unpredictability of gun …
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Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer, closed its Sioux Falls, SD, slaughterhouse after many Smithfield employees grew sick. Tyson Foods closed its Columbus Junction, IA pork slaughterhouse in April, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While many U.S. slaughterhouses are closing, pork slaughterhouses and pork producers are bracing for another coronavirus challenge: a virus called Severe Acute Diarrhea …
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Recently the Wall Street Journal reported on how many young people are now seeking “accommodations” at work for their anxiety, PTSD, depression, and other mental conditions.
The article provoked a lively discussion split largely on age lines. While older people accuse Gen Z members of being “emotional hemophiliacs,” Gen Z members often say they have real, palpable “mental illnesses” and need extra time to complete their …
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“Boxed warnings” or “black boxes” are the strictest FDA label warnings. They appear on cigarettes, fluoroquinolones (for tendon rupture), Lamictal (for SJS and TEN), Accutane (birth defects), and other products with well-known risks.
The industry obviously dislikes black boxes since they reduce sales (though their lobbyists charge the boxes “confuse” and “unnecessarily alarm” patients).
So it was no surprise that when the Read more…
It is a fluke of the news cycle that if we don’t hear a product warning frequently, we can “forgive” that product and think it has somehow become safe. While no one would “forgive” cigarettes, lead in drinking water or mercury in tuna, the public has definitely softened on the danger of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopause. So it is noteworthy that a recently released …
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Before direct-to-consumer ads, physicians tried to reassure patients they were probably fine. Today, drug ads and online symptom checkers do just the opposite. The most insidious are “unbranded” ads that scare people about a disease without mentioning the drug they are trying to sell. Notable unbranded disease campaigns sell the obscure exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, shift work sleep disorder, and non-24-hour, sleep-wake disorder. Unbranded advertising is designed to appear like a …
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Antibiotics serve two purposes for large-scale meat farmers. They allow them to raise animals in unsanitary, confined conditions that would otherwise kill or sicken them and they allow factory farmers to use less feed. How much less feed? Without antibiotics, 175,550 more tons of feed would be needed to grow U.S turkeys, lamented Michael Rybolt of the National Turkey Federation at 2008 hearings when the FDA tried …
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The Trump administration has proposed that insurance plans providing drug coverage to Medicare beneficiaries will no longer be forced to cover six hitherto “protected” drug classes. The classes — which include drugs for psychiatric conditions, cancer and immune diseases –– are among the priciest of all drugs and account for as much as 33 percent of total outpatient drug spending under Part D of Medicare.
Under …
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There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children, reported the New York Times in 2017. In Brazil, food giant Nestle sends vendors door-to-door hawking its high-calorie junk food and giving customers a full month to pay for their purchases. Nestle calls the junk food hawkers, who are themselves obese, “micro-entrepreneurs.”
Big Food is increasingly targeting poor countries as “emerging markets” …
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It is not clear whether Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade were getting drug treatment for depression. What is clear is that suicide in the U.S. has never been higher even as the use of SSRI antidepressants has also never been higher. One in every eight American adults recently took an antidepressant says the CDC and the number is only rising. Are the drugs working?
The use of …
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Long before the Internet and direct-to-consumer advertising, the medical profession tried to reassure people about their health concerns. Remember “take two aspirins and call me in the morning?”
Flash forward to today’s online “symptom checkers.” They are quizzes to see if someone has a certain disease and exhortations to see their doctor even if they feel fine. Once drug makers discovered that health fears and even hypochondria sell drugs, there seems …
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