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ACSM Recognizes These Ten Criteria For Responsible Health Reporting

For several years, I’ve been gently nudging various groups that communicate with the public about health care to adopt/endorse/promote the 10 criteria we use on HealthNewsReview.org in the same spirit in which we promote them: 10 things we think consumers need addressed in messages about health care interventions.

• What’s the total cost?
• How often do benefits occur?
• How often do harms occur?
• How strong is the evidence?
• Is this condition exaggerated?
• Are there alternative options?
• Is this really a new approach?
• Is it available to me?
• Who’s promoting this?
• Do they have a conflict of interest?

It may not be a perfect or complete list, but it’s not a bad starting point, and we now have data on more than 1,500 stories showing how these are – or are not – addressed in some of the public discussion.

I’ve urged the American Association of Medical Colleges, America’s Health Insurance Plans, news organizations, and news-release-writers, among others, to publish our criteria attached to their news releases or on their websites.

Many have been called. Many have nodded in agreement. None have responded.

Until now. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*

Increasing Government Oversight Of IRBs Could Help Prevent Seeding Trials

I thought I read the final chapter in the tale of Pfizer’s shady marketing practices for Neurontin years ago. Sadly, there’s at least one more chapter to go.

Recall that in 2008, leaked documents from a US District Court revealed that Pfizer had covered-up the results of a clinical trial which showed the drug didn’t work for chronic nerve pain, even as it promoted off-label use of the anti-seizure drug for that purpose. The next year, it was revealed that Parke-Davis (now a subsidiary of Pfizer) took advantage of lax disclosure policies by certain medical journals to publish 13 articles promoting off-label use of Neurontin that were ghostwritten and funded by the company without disclosing such arrangements.

isthatamisprint 300x200 Neurontin: Seeds of DiscontentNow, it has come to light that Parke Davis’ marketing department sponsored a Seeding Trial of Neurontin back in the day—that is, a trial portrayed deceptively as a patient study but whose real aim was to encourage prescribers to use the drug.

The trial was STEPS, the ‘Study of Neurontin: Titrate to Effect, Profile of Safety’ trial. More than 772 physician ‘investigators’ and 2800 patients participated in STEPS.

The stated objective of STEPS was to study the safety, efficacy and tolerability of Neurontin. However, after reviewing documents compiled for a pair of lawsuits against Pfizer and its subsidiaries, Joseph Ross and colleagues concluded that the actual objective was to increase prescribing rates by ‘investigators’ in the study. Neither the ‘investigators’ nor their patients were informed about the real purpose of STEPS.

The trial worked, from Parke-Davis’ point of view. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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