June 18th, 2010 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, True Stories
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I don’t know about the rest of you medical bloggers, but I’ve been getting emails from folks who run a website called DrugWatch.com asking for reciprocal links and promoting themselves as the go-to place for patients to get up-to-date information on medication safety.
Tucked into the website is this promise: “We will never accept advertising from the pharmaceutical industry.” Right. Because the whole site is a front for a bunch of Orlando lawyers trying to sniff out potential clients for medication-related lawsuits against the pharmaceutical industry. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog that Ate Manhattan*
May 17th, 2010 by RyanDuBosar in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News
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Congressional democrats want more transparency in healthcare, believing it would further drive down the cost of care, reports Politico.
Hoping to drive competition, some lawmakers are grumbling to force doctors to reveal business negotiations between them and drug and device makers. Opponents worry that manipulating economics would backfire. If everyone knows their competitor’s business, why bother negotiating lower prices?
But transparency worked for Wisconsin’s hospitals, not in business dealings but in reporting outcomes, reports The Fiscal Times. By voluntarily revealing clinical outcomes on the Web, the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality was able to spur low-performing hospitals to improve, high-performing facilities to eliminate tests that didn’t improve outcomes, and create an informed healthcare consumer with choices where to receive care.
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
May 13th, 2010 by Berci in Better Health Network, Medblogger Shout Outs, News, Opinion
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In the medical blogosphere, we talk a lot about medical community sites such as Sermo.com, Ozmosis.com or Doctors.net.uk and we always mention these as huge communities.
While Sermo has over 110,000 physician members, the Chinese dxy.cn has over 1.4 million professionals on its site. It has a blog, a conference site, a pharmacy channel, biomedical business information platform, it covers more than a 100 specialties, and offers thousands of jobs. I tried to translate the mission statement with Google Translate:
Lilac Garden Biomedical Science and Technology Network ( DXY.CN ) was established in July 23, 2000, and since its inception has been committed for the majority of medical professionals to provide a specialized life science platform. With professionalism and strong accumulation and the deepening and development of professional exchange, Lilac Garden has grown into the largest and most popular group of pharmaceutical industry professionals to network media platforms.
Now I’m looking for Chinese doctors who would help us create a Chinese section for PeRSSonalized Medicine, the easiest medical information aggregator that features only selected resources. If you know someone, please let me know.
*This blog post was originally published at ScienceRoll*
April 29th, 2010 by Steve Novella, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Research
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To be blunt up front –- SBM is not apologetic about the pharmaceutical industry. We get zero funding from any company, and have no ties of any kind to “big pharma.” In today’s world I have to spend time making that clear, because despite the reality critics are free to assume and falsely claim that our message is coming straight from the bowels of hell (a.k.a. the pharmaceutical industry).
We promote science-based medicine and criticize pharmaceutical companies along with everyone else when they place other concerns ahead of scientific validity, or promote bad science, for whatever reason.
It has become fashionable, however, to not only criticize the pharmaceutical industry but to demonize them –- and the term “big pharma” has come to represent this demonization. Cynicism is a cheap imitation of skepticism –- it is the assumption of the worst, without careful thought or any hint of fairness. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
April 22nd, 2010 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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It’s only Wednesday, and so far three patients have come to their office visits carrying Cynthia Gorney’s article from Sunday’s New York Times entitled “The Estrogen Dilemma.”
The article explores the stories of three women who found relief from perimenopausal symptoms by using hormone replacement, framing the discussion in the larger context of what is being called the “window hypothesis” — the idea that starting estrogen replacement in the perimenopause and continuing it into later life may be neuroprotective and even cardioprotective, in contrast to beginning its use 10 or more years after menopause, where it can trigger heart disease, stroke and dementia. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog that Ate Manhattan*
