Martha Rosenberg is a health reporter and the author of Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies and Born With a Junk Food Deficiency.
Once upon a time, anxiety was anxiety. Maybe you were going for a root canal, taking a flight when you were a nervous flier, or meeting your in-laws for the first time, so you had “nerves.”
That was then. Sensing an untapped market, drugmakers who funded writers of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or “DSM” (the Bible for mental conditions) recast anxiety as “really depression,” and suddenly everyone …
An interview with Jerome Hoffman, MD, professor emeritus at UCLA.
Martha Rosenberg: As professor emeritus at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), you engaged in what is laughingly called in academics the “triple threat” of research, teaching, and clinical work for 30 years. Can you please summarize a little of what you did?
Jerome Hoffman: You’re right – I spent my career as an old-style academic, doing those three types of work. …
If you think the labyrinth of U.S. government agencies and congressional subcommittees is complicated, be grateful you are not a pharmacy owner! Just to get your drugs reimbursed, you must navigate a river of upstream, midstream, and downstream suppliers, health plans and insurers, employers and other payers (including federal and state governments), rebate aggregators, “white and brown baggers,” and an alphabet soup of entities/concepts called things like PSAOs, GPOs, NADACs, …
Having worked as a copywriter and creative director at some of the world’s top ad agencies, including McCann Erickson (now McCann Worldgroup), I am vehemently critical of new advertising. Why? I know the tricks and how they manipulate well — think the old TV series Mad Men.
Leading the list of ads that I hate are direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug ads which began in the late 1990s. I am especially critical of …
As long as you live, you will never hear an article from news media contending that “America Runs On Duncan.” Why? Because the line is a marketing allegation created by the advertising company and designed to sell product.
Yet news media repeat medical claims from drug makers found in journals like they are news––which gives Pharma companies free advertising and can mislead consumers and patients.
The most recent example is the “news” …
According to some academics, in 2019, a ban on junk food advertising across London’s entire public transport network—foods and drinks high in fat and salt and ads for foods–resulted in the prevention of 100,000 obesity cases. Yet the U.S. love affair with the new semaglutide-based weight loss drugs like Ozempic gives junk food advertising and availability a huge pass.
Drug makers and Wall Street are pleased that instead of changing …
An excerpt from Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies.
Few fail to be shocked at the rising prices of some prescription drugs. “Drug companies have raised prices relentlessly for decades while manipulating the patent system and other laws to delay competition from lower-priced generics,” reported the House Committee on Oversight …
During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, suicides among active-duty troops were frequently reported. Since then, news reports have subsided but the suicides have not. In fact, a 2022 report from the Defense Suicide Prevention Office revealed that there were more suicides in 2021 than any other year since the September 11 attacks. According to Army Times, suicide deaths among active-duty troops in 2021 “climbed …
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) …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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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