The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) negated the recommendation of its expert panel and approved Aduhelm to treat Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), contending that the possible benefit trumped the lack of evidence of efficacy. The FDA was inexcusably in error in making this decision. Aside from the likely lack of benefit, the use of this drug can result in many negative consequences that make its use ethically questionable.
The manufacturer submitted two …
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A person’s lifetime medication consumption has a familiar and predictable pattern. The more a person ages, the greater their number of taken medication. However, the public behavior in initiating medication has been changed compared to thirty years ago.
Nowadays, parents demand to get their hands on OTC meds for their infants and toddlers.
In this piece, I am interested …
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 …
An installation to explore the impact of medications in daily life
Bob is a typical patient at the pharmacy with a chronic illness. Bob, along with 30 other random patients whom I followed in the year 2017, had been picked up to explore the number of medications they consumed in an average year. Bob took 4,280 prescription pills (no data on OTC consumption) …
“Something’s wrong with Eddie.”
In four words, my entire wedding day collapsed around me. I’d just arrived at a beautiful Gothic chapel in a rented 1950 Rolls Royce, mom and dad on either side of me, prepared for a picture-perfect first look with my groom. As his mother’s words echoed in my ear, I immediately thought of all the scenarios that could be easily remedied so we could move forward with …
When the “opioid crisis” is mentioned, most people think of heroin, prescription pills like oxycodone, or — more recently — the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Fewer people would think of novel opioids like tianeptine, although an increasing number of Americans have taken this substance in the form of over-the-counter supplements like ZaZaRed or Tianna – often without knowing that the substance has opioid properties that can cause dependence and overdose. …
Two weeks ago, my piece, “Cannabinoids are medicine, but patients aren’t getting the care they need,” was published. Since that time, I’ve heard from quite a few physicians who admitted that they did not know card-mills existed or, if they did, how they were different from Cannabis Specialist Physicians. From their collective perspective, pot was pot. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to …
It was September 11, 2001. My dad had cheated on my mom again, the building that I worked in at that time had received an anonymous tip that we were a potential target for the terrorist attacks, and my mom, who needed a reprieve from my dad’s crap, was vacationing in Florida and was worried for me and my well-being. Plus, my dad was threatening to kill himself, and I …
President Trump recently signed two executive orders directly related to prescription drug prices in the U.S.
One order would allow the “reimportation” of prescription drugs from Canada. This longstanding idea would allow U.S. pharmacies and drug wholesalers the ability to pay generally much lower prices for their prescription drugs by getting them from Canadian suppliers who benefit from government management of the system. Many consumers have been buying direct from Canadian …
An excerpt from Nurses are Nuts.
The pharmacy department plays a vital role in hospitals. They prepare and dispense medications. Sometimes the pharmacist will receive an order from the doctor on a med whose written dosage he is not sure of. In some cases, the pharmacist will …
“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…
In the wake of the opioid epidemic, benzodiazepines have been called “our other prescription drug problem” and “the next U.S. drug crisis.” Prescriptions are on the rise, with over 30 million Americans reporting benzodiazepine use in the previous year. This is alarming, as benzodiazepines are implicated in at least 30% …
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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Along with a steeper financial burden and an increasingly competitive academic environment, this year’s incoming freshman university class will likely be confronted with the pressure to take a little pill that some popular culture references say will make you “awesome at everything.” Or they may eschew the temptation and rely on the standard practice of study, sleep, repeat.
Welcome to #GenerationAdderall, the …
Lori Pinkley, a 50-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., has struggled with puzzling chronic pain since she was 15.
She has had countless disappointing visits with doctors. Some said they couldn’t help her. Others diagnosed her with everything from fibromyalgia to lipedema to the rare Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.
Pinkley has taken opioids a few times after surgeries, but they never helped her underlying pain, she said.
“I hate …
Americans have always loved their medicines and sought them out actively to cure whatever ailed them. Their interest ranged all the way from “staying well” to “feeling better.” Productivity in this hard-charging, pull yourself up by the bootstraps society required activity, and it’s hard to be active when you’re sick.
In the 18th-century in Germany, England, France, and Switzerland, men practicing pharmacy saw their retail operations as the …
Medical treatment has knocked down tumors in 6-year-old Easton Daniels’ brain, but the drug used also wiped out his immune system.
To bolster his immune function and help keep him healthy, he has visited a hospital for intravenous infusions of immune globulin about every month for the past year and a half.
But in early July, his family was stunned by a letter from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital: “All of Easton’s appointments canceled …
The bootleg medications were smuggled across the border and sold to mostly Latino immigrants in public spaces throughout Los Angeles — at swap meets, parks, beauty salons and makeshift stands outside mom-and-pop grocery stores.
The drugs were cheap, and the customers — mostly from Mexico and Central America — did not need prescriptions to buy them. Some of the products featured brand names and colorful packaging that immigrants knew well from …
With the recent FDA approval, Zolgensma became the world’s most expensive medication. Priced at $2.125 million per patient, the one-dose gene therapy is a potential life-saver for children with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). Now, the treatment is at the center of an intensifying debate over the rising price of medications.
Industry watchdogs are outraged. They say Zolgensma is merely the …
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 52-year-old woman is evaluated during a follow-up visit. She was discharged from the hospital 3 weeks ago following a small non–ST-elevation myocardial infarction treated with drug-eluting stent placement in the right coronary artery. An echocardiogram obtained during hospitalization showed normal left ventricular function and normal valvular function. Her …
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