Cancer Group Won’t Give Early Peek at Market-Moving Studies

Cancer docs won’t get the first look at the big cancer-drug studies coming out at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology megaconference. Instead, the cancer group will publish summaries of thousands of studies on May 15th, two weeks before the conference, for anyone who wants to see them.
That’s a big shift from the past [...]

Health Savings Accounts Favor the Wealthy

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office released today suggests that health savings accounts are fine for the rich — but that’s about it. Thurston Howell III would have loved HSAs Democratic congressmen Henry Waxman and Pete Stark blasted HSAs in a statement:
HSAs clearly are attractive to higher income people who are looking for tax [...]

Parsing Medicare’s Multibillion-Dollar Cancer Bill

Patients diagnosed with cancer in 2004 will cost Medicare $21.1 billion over the next five years, researchers are reporting.
There are plenty of different ways to slice the cost of cancer care; this slice, which
relies on a big National Cancer Institute registry and Medicare claims data, has the advantage of showing how costs wax and wane [...]

Health Blog Obit: Albert Hofmann, Father of LSD

Albert Hofmann, the drug-industry researcher who accidentally discovered the powerful hallucinogen LSD, died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 102. Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD (AP Photo) Hofmann, who worked as a chemist at Sandoz (now part of Novartis), first synthesized lysergic acid in 1938. But it was in 1943, when a small amount of LSD [...]

Big Pharma, Generics Fund Lobbying War Over Patents

Should a patent be invalidated if a company intentionally misled the patent office to get it?
That question is driving a multi-million dollar lobbying war in D.C., as drug makers and other patent-centric companies fight over the “inequitable conduct” rules of federal patent law, the NYT reports.
The current rules, under which patents are regularly revoked for [...]

McCain Looks to Private Market for Health Insurance Solution

John McCain wants to let the invisible hand of the market sort out the health insurance mess.
The main thrust of his plan, described in this speech yesterday, is to shift health insurance tax breaks from employer-sponsored insurance to individuals and families, who could apply a tax credit to insurance they buy on an open, less-regulated [...]

Will You Marry Me for Health Insurance?

Seven percent of Americans said that in the past year they or someone in their household decided to tie the knot mainly so one spouse would be eligible for the other’s health coverage.
That astonishing figure came from a survey out today from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that looks at health policy issues.
Is [...]

Elan Vets Set Up Health Fund in Ireland

Ireland, like a lot of European countries, has deep expertise in life sciences that isn’t matched by funding for start-ups that could capitalize on the insights.
Some former executives from Dublin-based drug maker Elan aim to change that with the launch of a 75-million-euro venture capital fund called Fountain Healthcare Partners.
The fund, based in Dublin, expects [...]

Nosy Hospital Staffers Plague Patients’ Files

Those unauthorized folks peeking at patients’ files (and, in a few cases, selling them) aren’t nefarious hackers in suburban basements. For the most part, they’re hospital employees, the WSJ reports.
If you don’t believe us, listen to Jill Dennis, a senior vice president at the American Health Information Management Association. “The internal mistakes and the internal [...]

Lupus Resists Biotech’s Autoimmune Push

Lupus, a nasty and mysterious disease, has proved impervious to yet another drug.
This time it’s Rituxan, co-marketed by Genentech and Biogen Idec and already approved for cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, which is, like lupus, an autoimmune disease. The companies said this morning that Lupus patients in a large trial of the drug fared no better [...]

Harvard Doc: Bring On the Free Pizza

A day after the nation’s med school association called for tighter restrictions on interactions between med schools and the drug industry, a Harvard doc lands on the Boston Globe op-ed page calling for closer ties between the two: [T]here is a need for more, not less, interaction between academic physician scientists and their counterparts in industry, [...]

Are Mandatory Registries for Diabetes Patients Worthwhile?

Everybody knows that diabetes is a big health problem that just keeps getting bigger. But do worries about the toll of the illness merit public health initiatives like those that helped tame small pox and yellow fever? Officials in the Health Blog’s hometown thinks so. For more than two years, New York has required that [...]

Ethicists Debate Matching Services for Organs

Should organ donors be able to decide who gets their gifts? A memorial to organ donors at a picnic for donors and recipients at University of Alabama, Birmingham The question is roiling the transplant community and came up at a recent conference called the Frontiers in Ethics in Transplantation, according to American Medical News, published by the [...]

Jobless Sock Government Spending on Health Care

For every percentage-point increase in unemployment, tack on another $3.4 billion in state and federal spending on health-care for low-income Americans. Unemployed people wait in line at the California Employment Development Department in San Jose, Calif. (Photo: AP) That’s the headline from a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. [...]

Stop the Med School Free-Pizza Madness!

Medical schools and teaching hospitals should ban gifts from makers of drugs and devices, including free food, travel and ghostwriting services, according to the findings report from a task force assembled by the Association of American Medical Colleges. Free pizza from drugmakers could be history in medical schools Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! [...]

FDA Sneezes at Claritin-Singulair Combo Pill

A marriage between Schering-Plough’s Claritin and Merck’s Singulair allergy drugs doesn’t seem meant to be. The companies said late Friday that the FDA had rejected an application for a pill that would combine the two drugs. Without explaining the FDA’s reasoning, they said they were “evaluating the agency’s response.”
The idea of a Singulair-Claritin combo had [...]

Hospitals to Patients: Pay Us Now, or We Won’t Treat You

On Dec. 6, 2006, Lisa Kelly arrived at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston with a check in hand for $45,000. It was an upfront payment for lab tests related to her leukemia. Lisa Kelly Afterward, a hospital oncologist wanted to admit her right away for treatment. But the hospital demanded another $60,000 on the spot. It [...]

Diabetes Danger Rises for Expectant Mothers

Need more evidence to convince you that diabetes is an insidious public health hazard? The rates of women with diabetes before they became pregnant doubled to nearly 2% in 2005 from 1999. iStockphoto Sure, even after the doubling, the absolute percentage seems small. But the trend is “extremely worrisome,” Dana Dabelea, who studies diabetes during pregnancy [...]

LASIK Patients Tell Their Woes to FDA

Patients who say their vision was marred, rather than improved by laser eye surgery, aired their grievances before an FDA panel convened today to assess the problems from the common procedure. Lasik patient David Shell (AP Photo) “Since LASIK, I am visually handicapped,” David Shell, told the panel, according to Reuters. “My eyes never feel comfortable… [...]

Panel: Mylan Exec, Governor’s Daughter, Didn’t Earn MBA

The COO of generics manufacturer Mylan was improperly awarded an executive MBA by West Virginia University, an investigative panel ruled this week. The COO, Heather Bresch, is the daughter of West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin.
The panel’s report caps a long-running controversy stirred up last fall, when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette checked into Bresch’s academic records after [...]

How Personal Health Records Could Make Care Less Efficient

High hopes are afoot for personal health records, online homes where patients can store their medical information to take from doctor to doctor and keep track of things like prescriptions and test results. Microsoft and Google, among others, are jumping in the patient-controlled record pool.
But on a visit to Health Blog HQ yesterday, Steve Leiber [...]

FDA’s Off-Label Promotion Notion: ‘Good Framework’ vs. ‘Fantasy’

We’re having flashbacks to James J. Kilpatrick going at it with Shana Alexander on “60 Minutes” after reading the opposing views of ex-FDAer Scott Gottlieb and former New England Journal of Medicine editor Jerome Kassirer on the FDA’s proposal to allow drug and device makers to use journal articles to promote their products for unapproved [...]

Constipation Drug Approved for the Very Ill and the Dying

The FDA yesterday approved a drug called Relistor to relieve constipation in very sick patients taking powerful painkillers.
The arrival of the drug, co-marketed by Wyeth and Progenics, is one more sign that the health-care world is paying more attention to easing symptoms in dying patients. As the WSJ reported last year, Relistor (generic name: methylnaltrexone) [...]

With Senate Vote on Genetic Discrimination, Godot Finally Arrives

The Senate yesterday passed a bill barring genetic discrimination that has been floating around Congress for more than a decade. It’s expected to sail through the House and be signed by the president. Waiting for Godot, via Getty Images The bill is supposed to prevent insurers from charging higher premiums or denying coverage based on risks in [...]

Amgen: Heartwarming Drama or ‘Painful Reality TV Show’?

Amgen’s cost-cutting showed results yesterday, as the company managed to increase its first-quarter earnings even as it continued to take a beating on its anemia drugs.
Earnings were up 2.3% year over year, while sales of anemia fighters Aranesp and Epogen were off 25% and 11%, respectively.
With the company’s stock way down (see chart) and a [...]

Neurontin Settlement: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

We just came across another drug education project that’s getting a boost from the 2004 settlement over off-label marketing of Pfizer’s pain and epilepsy medicine Neurontin.
Oregon’s attorney general said the state will give Consumers Union a grant of more than $4 million, care of the settlement. This one will go toward beefing up the group’s [...]

Schering-Plough’s Fred Hassan Antes Up

Fred Hassan, CEO of Schering-Plough, is putting his money where his mouth is. Fred Hassan (Photo: Associated Press) The drugmaker said today that Hassan purchased a tad more than $2 million of the company’s common stock, or 110,000 shares, at an average cost of $18.26 a share. Hassan pledged to buy the stock on January 18, [...]

Democrats in Congress Downplay Universal Coverage

Remember when President Bush talked big about revamping Social Security and then the proposal went nowhere? Well, Congressional Democrats are pouring some cold water on the expansive proposals for health reform being put forth by presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
While the candidates talk about plans to cover the country’s 47 million uninsured, some [...]

Rage for Doctor Ratings Fraught With Uncertainty

Doctors, doctors everywhere. But how do you choose which one to see? Can a service that helps consumers pick contractors work for doctors? You might check some of the services that let patients grade their docs on the Internet now. Restaurant tipster Zagat got into the act with WellPoint in January for people covered by some [...]

Pfizer’s Kindler Faces Restless Shareholders

The long stock slide at Pfizer has pushed the company’s shares below $20 a piece. This morning CEO Jeff Kindler has some explaining to do before shareholders at the company’s annual meeting in Memphis.
The WSJ’s Avery Johnson sat down with Kindler before his trip. Here are some highlights from their conversation.
What are you going to [...]

Drugs That Block Pleasure Can Be Depressing

Drugs that help reduce cravings for things like cigarettes and food may also hasten depression, a side effect that may limit the usefulness of the medicines. Pfizer’s Chantix, for example, aids folks trying to kick cigarettes by muting the effects of nicotine in the brain. But, the FDA said earlier this year, “it appears increasingly [...]

FDA Uncovers Problems at Merck Vaccine Plant

An FDA inspection of Merck’s big vaccine plant in West Point, Pennsylvania found 49 “areas of concern,” the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Karl Stark reports this morning. The agency’s report, which the Inquirer got under the Freedom of Information Act, cited issues including unwanted “fibers” on the stoppers of vials of MMR vaccine and a failure to [...]

Vertex Drug Shows Quick Results in Tough Hepatitis C Patients

The experimental drug telaprevir for hepatitis c looks promising for patients who have failed existing treatments, researchers are reporting. The data are from an early analysis of a rather small study (72 patients) with no control group. So it’s way too soon to say whether the drug, which inhibits an enzyme needed for the virus [...]

Former Bristol-Myers Exec Indicted, Accused of Lying to Feds

A botched 2006 deal to keep generic Plavix off the market already led Bristol-Myers Squibb to oust its CEO, plead guilty to a federal charge and pay a $1 million fine. Today, in a distant aftershock, a former Bristol SVP was indicted for allegedly misleading the government about the deal.
According to the indictment (which you [...]

GSK Exec: Our Cervical Cancer Vaccine Will Beat Merck’s

GlaxoSmithKline’s cervical cancer vaccine is definitely late to the party. While Merck sold $390 million of its Gardasil vaccine in the first quarter of this year, Glaxo sold a mere of $24 million worth of its Cervarix vaccine.
Just this morning, Cervarix got some bad news from France, where the health authority recommended against paying for [...]

Why Bushes and Frogs Matter for Health Care

The FDA said this morning that it had approved an examination glove made from the guayule bush. That could prove useful for health care workers and patients who are allergic to traditional latex rubber gloves (which are “made from the milky sap of a rubber tree, Hevea braziliensis,” the FDA notes).
The agency said it’s the [...]

Rehabbing NBA Players Make Like Astronauts

The size and speed of NBA stars sometimes gives them the air of extra-terrestrials. Now some injured NBA pros are using an anti-gravity treadmill based on a NASA program to keep athletes fit in outer space, the Los Angeles Times reports.
A few injured Lakers have used the thing recently, the article says, following the lead [...]

Drug Research Jobs Following Manufacturing Overseas

While Congress is busy figuring out how to keep track of the ballooning overseas drug manufacturing business, the industry is busy moving up the off-shore food chain, from basic manufacturing to the more complex task of researching new drugs.
Genzyme, a Cambridge-based biotech shop, said yesterday that it’s spending $90 million to build a 350-person R&D [...]

Rep. Dingell to FDA Chief: ‘You’re Not the First Fella I’ve Had to Skin’

It’s easy enough for congressmen to pound the table and holler that the FDA needs to improve its oversight of foreign drug plants. But if they really want to do something about it, they’re going to have to put our money where their mouths are.
The Government Accountability Office said in this report yesterday that it [...]

Glaxo to Acquire Red-Wine Pill Maker Sirtris

This just in: GlaxoSmithKline says it will acquire Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a Massachusetts biotech company that’s developing a drug based on resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine that is thought to fight some effects of aging. Glaxo said in a news release that the $720 million deal will help it get involved with sirtuins, a [...]

Would Universal Coverage Lengthen Life Expectancies?

The fact that life-spans in some parts of the U.S. have actually declined in the last quarter-century will no doubt add fuel to the fires of the health-care reform debate. But the Harvard researchers behind the study warn that the most common fix bandied about by policymakers — covering the uninsured — likely wouldn’t do enough [...]

Eighth Grader Arrested After Alleged Peanut Allergy Prank

Some school pranks just aren’t cool.
An eighth grader in Kentucky was arrested Sunday on a charge of felony wanton endangerment, accused of planting peanut butter cookie crumbs in the lunchbox of a classmate with a severe peanut allergy, the Associated Press reported. The classmate, whose allergy a school spokeswoman said was well known, didn’t eat [...]

Canadians May Get Easier Access to Plan B

Canadians soon may be able to buy the “morning after” emergency-contraceptive pill known as Plan B as easily as they can pick up other drugs right off the shelf. But some pharmacists there aren’t so sure that’s a good idea.
In the U.S., Plan B is sold by Barr Pharmaceuticals, typically over-the-counter for consumers 18 and [...]

Medco Keeps UnitedHealth as Drug-Benefits Customer

Medco is hanging on to its biggest fish.
The pharmacy benefits manager said this morning that insurance giant UnitedHealth Group will stick with Medco in a contract that lasts through the end of 2012.
The news sent Medco’s shares up 7% in morning trading, after there had been fear on Wall Street that United might take the [...]

Wyeth Goes for Bargain Price on Replacement for Effexor

After Wyeth’s Pristiq long, rocky road to approval, the company’s trying to smooth the antidepressant’s path to doctors’ prescription pads with a cut-rate price. Wyeth Headquarters (Mike Derer/Associated Press) The company said during its earnings call this morning that it will price the antidepressant at a 20% discount to its older blockbuster antidepressant, Effexor XR. Pristiq is [...]

Life Expectancy Falls In Pockets of U.S.

Not everybody is living longer.
Sure, most Americans’ life expectancy has increased in recent years, but there have been declines in some regions of the country, especially for women. The drops took place primarily in Appalachia, the Deep South and stretches of the Mississippi River basin, Harvard University researchers found. Race and poverty weren’t entirely to [...]

Heart Group Calls for Cardiac Tests for Kids Before ADHD Drugs

The American Heart Association has made a new recommendation that’s already stirring up some controversy: Children with ADHD should have a thorough heart work-up, including an electrocardiogram, before taking stimulants such as Ritalin to treat the condition, the WSJ reports this morning. iStockphoto The testing could help prevent rare cases of sudden cardiac arrest that have [...]

FDA Points Finger at China on Heparin Once More

Geopolitics, public health and global business all bubbled up in dueling press conferences over the heparin imbroglio today.
First, Chinese officials said the scores of deaths associated with the blood thinner may not be traceable to China after all. A few hours later, the FDA held its own press conference, where officials said they have evidence [...]

Are General Surgeons the Primary Care Docs of the Operating Room?

The number of general surgeons per capita has fallen by about 25% in the past quarter century, researchers are reporting this afternoon.
One key driver of this trend is a move toward specialization by young docs. In 1992, 55% of surgeons did a subspecialty fellowship after finishing surgical residency; now that figure is over 70%, the [...]

On a Psych Rotation, Med Student Discovers His Own Anorexia

Med students, barraged with an endless list of ways the human body can falter, often fall into spells of hypochondria. Sometimes, though, medical training prompts students to discover real disease in themselves.
David Gwynfor Samuel, a final-year med student in the U.K., realized he had anorexia when his psychiatry rotation took him to an eating disorder [...]

Merck Searches for Goldilocks Biotech

As Merck continues its post-Vioxx makeover, the company is prowling for a nice biotech company to buy.
Merck CEO Richard Clark told Dow Jones Newswires’ Peter Loftus that the “perfect” deal would be a company with a mid-sized market cap, some products already for sale and a research focus that would complement Merck’s research efforts. “We’re [...]

Feds Fight to Keep Medicare Doctor Data Secret

The Bush administration has repeatedly pushed for more transparency in health care, so consumers can be well informed when choosing a doctor or a hospital. But the administration’s been fighting in federal court to keep private the health-info mother lode: the Medicare claims database, which has data on more than 700,000 doctors.
Last year, a federal [...]

Pro Wrestler Turned Analyst Turned Sex Potion Salesman

An American tale: A pro wrestler and TV financial analyst is selling an energy drink that promises “better sex without a prescription.” The story of John Layfield, a Texan and the son of a minister, lands on the front of the New York Times business section this morning. The drink, called Mamajuana Energy, is [...]

Clinton, McCain & Obama Talk Health; Orszag Tallies Costs

Some day, hard as it may seem to believe, the Democratic primaries will end and the contest with the GOP for the presidency will begin in earnest. Come that day, health care is likely to remain one of the biggest domestic policy differences between McCain and either Obama or Clinton, this morning’s WSJ reports.
Meanwhile, back [...]

Last Rites for Autopsies

The inevitability of death used to be followed by an almost certain medical ritual: the autopsy. Today, though, fewer than one in 10 deaths in the U.S. results in an autopsy, the Los Angeles Times reports. Cost is a barrier. An autopsy can cost thousands of dollars and isn’t covered by most insurers or Medicare, [...]

Lipitor No Help for Dementia of Alzheimer’s Patients

More news from that big neurology meeting : Lipitor doesn’t help slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients, researchers said this week.
That’s something of a disappointment, given that it was a big, randomized study, and earlier data had showed promise. On the other hand, Alzheimer’s patients who took Lipitor at least didn’t seem to do [...]

Lipitor No Help for Alzheimer’s Patients

More news from that big neurology meeting : Lipitor doesn’t help slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients, researchers said this week.
That’s something of a disappointment, given that it was a big, randomized study, and earlier data had showed promise. On the other hand, Alzheimer’s patients who took Lipitor at least didn’t seem to do [...]

Alzheimer’s Vaccine on Hold Amid Safety Investigation

In another setback for the idea that a vaccine might be able to fight Alzheimer’s, two clinical tests of an experimental vaccine known as ACC-001 from Wyeth and Elan have been halted for the investigation of a potential safety problem.
In March, one of 59 patients enrolled in studies in Europe and the U.S. was [...]

Zimmer Cleaning House on Payments to Docs

Is real reform coming to the orthopedic implant business?
Zimmer, which paid $85 million to orthopedic surgeons and other “consultants” in the first 10 months of last year, says it’s making big changes “to aggressively reduce potential or perceived conflicts of interest inherent in consulting relationships between the industry and healthcare professionals.”
The company is reviewing all [...]

Incontinence Drugs May Hurt Memory

Lots of systems deteriorate in the aging body; sometimes in trying to fix one thing, you end up making another thing worse. For example, popular drugs for urinary incontinence may speed age-related memory loss, researchers said yesterday. iStockphoto Prompted by anecdotal reports of patients having memory problems after going on a class of drugs that includes Pfizer’s [...]

Wal-Mart, Nalgene Move Away From Bisphenol A

Popular plastic water bottles, sippy cups and baby bottles made with a chemical called bisphenol A may be on their way out. Globe & Mail Two big signs in this morning’s papers: Wal-Mart says it’s going to stop selling BPA baby bottles early next year, and the company that makes Nalgene water bottles says it will stop [...]

A Second Chance for Canceled Health Insurance in California

For a while now, California officials have been scrutinizing the way several big insurance companies cancel the policies of the sick and the pregnant, leaving patients on the hook for medical bills. Now state officials say patients will have the chance to have their policies reinstated and their medical bills paid by their former insurers, [...]

Harvard Docs: Bring On the Drug Reps

Some legislators in Massachusetts would like to make the Bay State the first to ban any gifts to doctors from drug makers, right down to pens with product logos. Docs taking as little as a pen or a slice of pizza from Big Pharma could end up paying $5,000 in fines and serving two years [...]

Bring On the Drug Reps

Some legislators in Massachusetts would like to make the Bay State the first to ban any gifts to doctors from drug makers, right down to pens with product logos. Docs taking as little as a pen or a slice of pizza from Big Pharma could end up paying $5,000 in fines and serving two years [...]

Pfizer Shares Hit 10-Year Low on Falling Earnings

Pfizer’s shares haven’t been this low since Oct. 1, 1997, back when the Health Blog was a college freshman. Some Wall Street analysts were pretty glum about the company’s first-quarter earnings announcement. Profit fell 18%, cholesterol drug Lipitor saw another decline despite competing Vytorin’s woes, and sales of allergy drug Zyrtec and blood-pressure remedy [...]

Better Prescribing Courtesy of Neurontin

Thanks to a big settlement back in 2004 over off-label marketing epilepsy drug Neurontin, there’s a new source of information about prescription drugs that isn’t funded directly by Big Pharma.
Run by the University of North Carolina and bankrolled with a chunk of the Neurontin settlement, Prescribing for Better Outcomes is poring over research on uses [...]

Pentagon Seeks Battlefield Device to Diagnose Brain Injury

Roadside bombs have made brain damage a grim hallmark of modern war. A RAND study out today says 320,000 U.S. troops may have suffered brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan — and less than half say they were ever evaluated by a doctor. Even where there’s no unconsciousness or visible head wound, mild brain damage, [...]

Cigna Will Stop Paying for Hospital Blunders

Insurance giant Cigna said today it’s clamping down on payments for surgical procedures on the “wrong side, wrong site, wrong body part or wrong person.”
The health insurer (when allowed under its hospital contracts, of course) is joining a growing roster of payers who are stopping their reimbursements of hospitals for what they call “never events” [...]

Glaxo and Regulus Ink Deal on Small, Small RNA

Big Pharma’s getting really interested in really tiny RNA.
GlaxoSmithKline has inked a deal with a company called Regulus, a joint venture of Alnylam and Isis that’s doing research in a budding field around something called microRNA. The crux of it, discussed in more detail in this post, is that microRNAs are itty bitty strands of [...]

How the Flu Virus Trots the Globe Each Year

Lots of folks were caught off-guard by this year’s unusual flu season. Perhaps North Americans should take more notice when the folks over in Southeast Asia start sneezing. New research is suggesting that the flu bug trots around the globe in a pretty predictable pattern, the Washington Post reports. It seems to start off in [...]

Heartbeat Genes Could Provide Alternative to Pacemakers

Pacemakers have kept millions of patients’ tickers on track for years, but they’re by no means a perfect solution for people with slow or irregular heartbeats. Besides requiring a surgical procedure, the devices’ batteries fade and their wires can go bad. Columbia University heart researcher Michael Rosen has been working on an alternative: putting pacemaker [...]

A Looming Shortage, or the Wrong Doctors in the Wrong Places?

The medical education establishment is gearing up to push for more doctors to be trained in medical schools and residency programs — an expensive undertaking that would be financed largely by the federal government.
Since 2000, 18 separate reports “produced or funded by states, medical societies, hospital associations, and research centers have concluded that doctor shortages [...]

What Does Martha Stewart Know About Caring for the Elderly?

The list of witnesses testifying before the Senate Special Committee on Aging this afternoon includes the predictable academic docs and health-world leaders, along with a striking anomaly: Martha Stewart, Founder, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, New York, NY
You ask: What, is she going to teach the Senators a cute way to fold napkins when they have [...]

Judge: NYC Can Force Chain Restaurants to Post Calorie Counts

If you tell somebody how many calories are in that bacon double cheeseburger he’s about to order, might he order the grilled chicken sandwich instead?
New York City’s Health Department thinks so, and a federal judge just greenlighted the city’s plan to force chain restaurants to post calorie counts. The New York State Restaurant Association had [...]

Medicare May Add to List of No-Pay Hospital Errors

Last year, Medicare said it would stop paying hospitals to treat certain conditions that arise after patients are admitted to the hospital and tend to be caused by poor hospital care. Now the feds say they may expand the program to more than double the number of hospital-associated conditions that won’t be reimbursed.
The shift is [...]

A Primary Care Doc Rejects Insurance, Gets Happy

Albert Fuchs, a primary care doc, lands on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page this morning telling the story of his career as a physician and a business owner.
He opened a practice and grew so busy he couldn’t keep up. So he dropped the insurance plan with the worst reimbursement. As his practice continued to [...]

Next Target for Genentech’s Rituxan: Lupus

Will Rituxan work for lupus?
On the one hand, the drug is already approved for rheumatoid arthritis which, like lupus, is an autoimmune disorder. On the other hand, it just failed in a trial of patients with a hard-to-treat form of multiple sclerosis, also an autoimmune disorder.
Results of a Rituxan trial in lupus are due in [...]

Master of Liposuction: Peter Fodor

When it comes to liposuction, we figure there may be a few questions floating around that some of our readers haven’t had the opportunity or the courage to ask. Thanks to the kind folks at The HealthCare Channel, we have a “virtual office visit” with a real plastic surgeon to the stars: Peter Fodor, a Beverly [...]

Generics Dampen Cost Increases in Cancer Care

Yes, the price of treating cancer is rising steadily with the advent of expensive targeted drugs. But that rise has been checked, for now, by the arrival of generic versions of some widely used chemotherapy drugs. The average annual drug cost per cancer patient was $13,113 as of Jan. 1 of this year, up from $6,490 [...]

Vytoringate: James Stein, ‘Man in the Middle’

As Congress investigates the delay in the release of data from Merck and Schering-Plough’s now infamous Enhance trial of Vytorin, one of the key players is speaking up.
James Stein, a cardiologist at the University of Wisconsin, had reservations about the way the companies were characterizing a meeting of experts on the trial, which failed to [...]

Drug Safety Monitoring for the 21st Century

For all the health data sitting on computers in this country, our drug safety surveillance is remarkably primitive, relying on clinical trials (which capture a tiny percentage of those taking prescription drugs) and sporadic reports from doctors and drugmakers.
A deal being announced today could change that. The FDA will contract with WellPoint, the country’s biggest [...]

FDA to Open China Office This Year

The diplomatic details are still being worked out, but the FDA is likely to have a China beachhead up and running by the end of the year.
The agency is planning to put employees in place next month, and to open a full-fledged office this fall, the Secretary Health and Human Services told the Associated Press [...]

Evidence for Adding Pharmacists to Primary Care Mix

We can’t turn around these days without bumping into somebody worried about the fate of primary care; it seems pretty clear that there won’t be enough front-line docs to coordinate care for everyone.
But other health-care providers should be able to pick up at least some primary-care tasks. In addition to the oft-cited nurse practitioners and [...]

Retooling Health Care for a Graying Boston: Hebrew SeniorLife

A report from the Institute of Medicine today calls for more geriatric training for health-care workers at all levels to prepare for a wave of elderly patients coming soon.
For a glimpse of what those preparations might look like, consider Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, which runs two nursing homes, as well as assisted living and other [...]

End of Life Care: Count the IVs

We offer this stark image, courtesy of the blog The Happy Hospitalist, as a follow-up to our posts this morning on a looming shortage of health workers to care for aging Baby Boomers and a reformer’s call for health insurance to be scrapped.
The Happy Hospitalist post, titled “87 Years Old,” was all the more powerful [...]

Stay Well, Baby Boomers: Health Worker Shortage Looms

Sometimes, even hearing what you already know can be unsettling. If current trends continue, Americans will “face a health care workforce that is too small and critically unprepared to meet their health needs,” the Institute of Medicine says this morning. This is due not only to the aging of the Baby Boomers, but also to [...]

Does One City Need Five Heart Transplant Programs?

Chicago is tied with Philly for a title of dubious value: metro area with the most adult heart transplant centers. If you’re a heart transplant patient, you want to go to a hospital that does tons of transplants. But having so many programs in one city means no single center performs that many procedures, the [...]

Is Health Care Married to the Mob?

Anybody who visits this blog even occasionally knows that most providers of health care aren’t exactly bosom buddies with insurers. Tony Sirico/AP Still, an opinion piece by crime novelist and psychology prof Jonathan Kellerman in today’s WSJ goes further than anything we’ve seen in saying the insurance system is the central health-care problem in this country. [...]

To Save Itself, Big Pharma Adds Strategy Executives

Big Pharma has been accused of being a bureaucratic behemoth that’s too slow to adapt to the scientific and market realities of the 21st century. Several big industry players are responding by … wait for it … adding a new layer of high-level executives, the WSJ reports.
J&J, not often accused of running too lean, added [...]

Even the Insured Face High Prices for Expensive Drugs

Tired of your prescription drug co-pay going up? Be grateful you have a co-pay. Rather than a fixed co-pay, some insurers are now requiring people to pay between 20% and 33% of the cost of certain expensive prescription drugs, the New York Times reports. That cost-shifting can put people on the hook for thousands of [...]

Cabbages, Condoms and HIV in Thailand

“Sorry, we have no mints,” reads the sign at Cabbages & Condoms Restaurant in Bangkok. “Please take a condom.” The restaurant is owned by Thailand’s Population and Community Development Association, a nonprofit founded in the ’70s to promote family planning. But when HIV came to Thailand, the group’s leader, Mechai Viravaida, took to the nation’s [...]

Minutes for Key Vytorin Meeting Were Written A Month Later

Merck and Schering-Plough attempted to recreate information from a crucial meeting about a major study on Vytorin after a Congressional panel began an investigation, according to documents obtained by a Congressional subcommittee, the WSJ reports.
In a letter Friday, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) asked why minutes of the companies’ ad [...]

Nursing Homes Push Arbitration, Reduce Lawsuits

Nursing homes, stung by some big jury verdicts in the late 1990s, have been pushing residents to waive their rights to sue and arbitrate disputes instead.
Now the average cost per claim against nursing homes is falling, but some critics are suggesting the industry takes it too far in some cases, the WSJ reports.
In one jury [...]

Death Spiral Holds Enduring Appeal

It’s tough to resist a graphic that begins, “Total odds of dying, any cause: 1 in 1.” The image caught our eye on Digg, where it’s garnered thousands of Diggs and hundreds of comments in the past few days. A bit of Googling led us to National Geographic, and a few calls led us to [...]

Hospitalized Children at Greater Risk for Drug Errors Than Adults

More than one in ten hospitalized kids has a bad reaction to a drug — and more than a fifth of those cases are preventable. Those startling figures, from a study in this month’s Pediatrics, are far higher than previously reported. The Joint Commission, which accredits hospitals, issued an alert yesterday in response to the [...]

FDA Signals High Bar for Stem Cell Treatments

Yes, human embryonic stem cells are full of scientific promise. But there’s still a lot of mystery about how therapies derived from cells will actually work in the body, and the FDA may require unusually compelling evidence in evaluating the treatments.
At a meeting yesterday, the chief of the FDA’s cell and tissue therapy branch said [...]

Medicare Advisors: Pay More for Primary Care, Less for Procedures

Medicare should pay more for primary care and less for procedures and specialty care, a Medicare advisory board said at a meeting this week.
Plenty of people have been saying that lately, of course, but this comes from MedPac, a commission created by Congress to advise lawmakers on Medicare.
Health care winds up costing more when there [...]

Nuns To Build $140 Million Hospital, As They Close Unprofitable Facility

A nonprofit health-care system sponsored by the Franciscan Sisters of Mary is closing an unprofitable hospital in an Illinois town at the same time it’s moving ahead with a $140 million hospital in Janesville, Wisc., just over the state line.
In a memo obtained by the Chicago Tribune, Sister Mary Jean Ryan, CEO of SSM Health [...]

Young, Less-Educated Mothers at Greater Risk for Postpartum Depression

Want to reduce your chances of suffering from depression after you have a baby? Stay in school, don’t rush into things and get married first. The Health Blog doesn’t mean to preach at you; we’re just reporting on data published today by the CDC.
After crunching survey results from 17 states, the agency found that in [...]

Young, Less-Educated Mothers at Greatest Risk for Postpartum Depression

Want to reduce your chances of suffering from depression after you have a baby? Stay in school, don’t rush into things and get married first. The Health Blog doesn’t mean to preach at you; we’re just reporting on data published today by the CDC.
After crunching survey results from 17 states, the agency found that in [...]

Report: U.S. Wastes More Than Half of Health Spending

Health care isn’t exactly known for its efficiency, but a new analysis from PricewaterhouseCoopers puts the value of the waste sloshing around in the system at a whopping $1.2 trillion a year. That’s right. Trillion–with a T. The findings of the firm’s Health Research Institute suggest that up to that much “wasteful spending” could be [...]

Former Merck Exec Has Time On His Hands

In the never-ending re-org that is today’s pharma industry, plenty of execs are making unplanned exits that leave them with time on their hands and, if all goes well, cash in their pockets. Take Bradley Sheares, who ran Merck’s U.S. prescription drug business until a management shake-up in 2006, then was CEO of specialty drug-maker [...]

Early Ends to Positive Cancer Trials Have Drawbacks

The benefits of experimental cancer drugs could be inflated when clinical trials are halted early, a study in the latest issue of the Annals of Oncology suggests.
Monitoring boards can halt clinical trials if a medicine appears to have a serious safety baggage, if it shows no benefit or if it appears to show so much [...]

Geeks Take Drugs to Think Better

Lots of science and engineering types are apparently taking drugs to sharpen their thinking. Earlier this year, the journal Nature posted an online survey on the subject; twenty percent of the people who responded said they’ve taken drugs for non-medical reasons to improve concentration, focus or memory, the journal reports today.
Of those who had taken [...]

WellCare Flubs Data Privacy for 10,000 Georgians

As if WellCare Health Plans didn’t have enough to worry about, it turns out personal data for some 10,000 Georgia health-plan members was available online for more than a week recently before the company fixed the problem.
WellCare, which acts as a Medicaid or SCHIP managed-care plan to 450,000 Georgians, is already under criminal investigation [...]

Court Blocks Medicare Test to Lower Lab Costs

Any time you try to save a few bucks in health care, somebody’s ox gets gored — and that somebody usually argues that patients will suffer as a result.
That’s what medical labs are arguing in a case against Medicare, which is trying to start a pilot project to bring competitive bidding to some lab tests. [...]

Docs in Drugstore Clinics to Provide ‘Urgent Care Light’

MedStar Health, a big nonprofit hospital chain, is trying a new variation on the retail clinic theme. Most retail clinics, popping up in drugstores and big box retailers around the country, are staffed by nurse practitioners and physicians assistants who treat only minor ailments. But MedStar plans to open clinics staffed by doctors in four [...]

From ENHANCE to SANDS: A Nugget for Zetia?

Will defenders of Merck’s and Schering-Plough’s beleaguered cholesterol drug Zetia find solace in a clinical trial called Sands?
It’s possible because results appearing in the current issue of JAMA suggest that Zetia, also an ingredients in Vytorin, might have helped patients at high risk of heart disease by the same measure in which it failed in [...]

Lung Cancer Warning May Be Last Gasp for Inhaled Insulin

Pfizer said this morning that it’s adding a warning about lung cancer to the labeling for its inhaled insulin Exubera. The number of cases is low — six out of 4,740 patients treated with the drug, compared with one case out of 4,292 comparable patients who did not receive the drug. It’s not clear whether [...]

A Family Doctor Considers Double-Booking Patients

Benjamin Brewer, family doc and WSJ.com columnist, has a problem. The guy is up to his ears in patients, yet nearly every day he finds himself idled by patient no-shows.
Brewer writes in his latest column that a recent study found doctors increase the efficiency of their practice by double-booking appointments, in the same way [...]

FDA Triples Count of Heparin-Related Deaths

Earlier this year, the FDA said the recalled blood thinner heparin had been associated with 19 deaths since the beginning of last year. But numbers posted on the agency’s Web site today put the number at 62.
The cases peaked between November, 2007 and February, 2008. During those four months, there were 47 reports of deaths [...]

Rich, Not Poor, Are Crowding Emergency Rooms

This is the conventional wisdom: Priced out of health insurance, ever more Americans are crowding into emergency rooms because they can’t afford a trip to the doctor. Yes, ERs are getting busier. But it’s not because of poor people or the uninsured, according to this analysis in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The study is [...]

FDA Faults Glaxo For Failure to Report on Avandia Studies

With all the Vytorin news lately, we’d almost forgotten about Avandia, GlaxoSmithKline’s beleaguered diabetes drug. FDA didn’t. An agency inspection of GSK’s North Carolina offices found that the company “failed to report data relating to clinical experience” for the drug, according to this letter the FDA recently sent to GSK. The drug maker failed to [...]

CEO Survival: Abbott’s White Edges Genentech’s Levinson

An otherwise dull men’s college basketball tournament was redeemed by Kansas’ overtime win against Memphis last night. But here at Health Blog HQ, we’ve been riveted for the past few weeks by a different competition: The Drug Company CEO Survival Tournament.
While the victor in our bracket won’t be known for years, the voting by more [...]

New Player in Personal DNA Profiling Emphasizes Privacy

Another company is jumping into the growing world of direct-to-consumer DNA testing today. For $2,500, Navigenics will tell you your genetic risk for 18 different diseases — at least according to the best available genetic studies. Another $250 a year gets you an ongoing subscription to the company’s services.
As the WSJ notes, the company has [...]

$200 Million Gift Keeps Atlanta Hospital Afloat

Even as some nonprofit hospitals are awash in cash, many big public hospitals are struggling. Exhibit A is Atlanta’s Grady Memorial, a big, urban, safety-net hospital that treats the poor, taking on unprofitable cases that other hospitals avoid. With a huge deficit and reported problems with patient care, Grady’s been a hospital on the brink. [...]

Sen. Grassley Knocks Psychiatrist’s Funding from AstraZeneca

A University of Cincinnati psychiatrist who was the lead author of a 2002 study that concluded kids did well on AstraZeneca’s antipsychotic Seroquel has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the company since then, according to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley (pictured) raised the issue in a floor statement last week in support of [...]

Slumping Drug Stocks Get Some Adrenaline

Some drug makers whose shares have been suffering lately are seeing some rebounds today.
In midday trading, shares of Merck and Schering-Plough, dogged lately by the Energizer bunny of a Vytorin controversy, were up 4% and 5%, respectively. Meanwhile, Wyeth was up 6%. Novartis was bucking the trend, down 3% after the company said it will [...]

What Does It Cost to Start a Medical School, Anyway?

The U.S. went more than 30 years without a new med school (not counting osteopathic schools, which grant the D.O. degree). But in the last few years, a dozen or so institutions have set out to create new schools to mint MDs. Just last week, Hofstra University and North Shore-LIJ Health System on Long Island, [...]

Can Blogging Kill You? We Don’t Think So

Quite a few of our concerned friends and loved ones have been emailing us links to a New York Times story that ran this weekend about three high-profile bloggers stricken with heart attacks. The reason for the story: “Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger [...]

What Does It Cost to Start a Medical School, Anyway?

The U.S. went more than 30 years without a new med school (not counting osteopathic schools, which grant the D.O. degree). But in the last few years, a dozen or so institutions have set out to create new schools to mint MDs. Just last week, Hofstra University and North Shore-LIJ Health System on Long Island, [...]

Ob-Gyn Group Reconsiders Position on Abortion Referrals

Last November, the ethics committee of a professional society for obstetricians and gynecologists said doctors who refuse to perform abortions and other practices on religious or moral grounds owe patients a timely referral to another doctor willing to go ahead. Now, the group is re-evaluating the position after receiving criticism, including “strong concern” expressed by [...]

UCLA Hospital Employee Couldn’t Contain Celeb Curiosity

First Britney Spears, next Farrah Fawcett. Now, add California first lady Maria Shriver — and 60 other people — to the growing list of patients whose records were snooped at in UCLA Medical Center. Dan Steinberg/AP More than half of the people on the 60-patient list are celebrities, politicians and high-profile patients, though most of their identities [...]

Novartis Spends Big on Diversification

Novartis is wading deeper into the eye-care business with plans for a $39 billion acquisition of food giant Nestle’s majority stake in Alcon, maker of Opti-Free contact lens solution, and a slew of surgical and pharmaceutical products for the eye.
The move is another push by Novartis to diversify beyond its struggling brand-name drug business. Novartis [...]

Plentiful Services Drive Health Costs at End of Life

Everybody’s got a plan for curing what ails health care. Now some folks at Dartmouth College have a little cold water to pour on some of them.
The latest edition of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care is out today, showing that the cost of individual medical services isn’t the big driver of Medicare spending, at [...]

What Does It Cost to Start a Medical School, Anyway?

The U.S. went more than 30 years without a new med school (not counting osteopathic schools, which grant the D.O. degree). But in the last few years, a dozen or so institutions have set out to create new schools to mint MDs. Just last week, Hofstra University and North Shore-LIJ Health System on Long Island, [...]

$4 Generic Nation: Ralphs, Fred Meyer, QFC Sign On

The Wal-Martization of generic drug prices rolls on today, with Ralphs, Fred Meyer and QFC boarding the $4 generics bus. No big surprise here — all three chains, with stores in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and California, are part of Kroger, the supermarket/drugstore empire that last fall announced $4 generics in a bunch of its other [...]

UnitedHealth Tries to Dig Out from Customer Service Problems

Admitting that you have a problem may be the first step toward a solution. But, as UnitedHealth is discovering, it isn’t the last.
Since the company admitted late last year that bad service cost it 315,000 customers, UnitedHealth’s stock has fallen sharply (see chart), along with shares in other big insurers.
And the company has been hit [...]

In the U.K., a Push for Primary Care from Pharmacists

The U.K. is pushing for pharmacists to step into primary care, the FT reports.
Pharmacists would administer tests for STDs and minor ailments, give vaccinations, and prescribe some drugs under a government plan announced yesterday. The health minister said the plan would give general practice docs time to deal with more complex health issues. “These proposals [...]

A Retail Clinic for Healthy People

Health care would be a great business if it weren’t for all the sick people. Richard McCauley, MD, may have fixed that.
“If you cough, you’re in the wrong place,” he told the Ventura County Star. His store, WellnessMart, sells things like screening tests, checkups and vaccinations. McCauley doesn’t take health insurance, but he’d be glad [...]

On Top of Tax Breaks, Nonprofit Hospitals Reap Big Profits

There’s big money in health care, even for institutions that aren’t chartered to make a profit. The combined net income of the 50 largest nonprofit hospitals in this country was more than $4 billion in 2006, up from less than $1 billion in 2001, the WSJ reports. There are a bunch of reasons for the [...]

What Will Primary Care Look Like in 20 Years?

We know primary care’s messed up. Docs get paid a lot for doing procedures, but not much for sitting with patients, trying to figure out what’s wrong and what to do about it. So where do we go from here?
A commentary in this week’s JAMA lays out a few primary care models that people are [...]

First Britney, Now Farrah: More Privacy Issues at UCLA Hospital

LA is a company town, and some employees at UCLA Medical Center seem to be having a tough time keeping their noses out of movie stars’ business. The med center fired more than a dozen employees and disciplined others, including six physicians, for unauthorized looks at Britney Spears’s medical records, the Los Angeles Times reported [...]

Vytorin Postgame: Dueling Opinions

The Vytorin chatter has died down a bit, but the occasional aftershock is still rattling here and there across the vast plain of the Internet.
Harlan Krumholz, a Yale doc who at a big cardiology conference last weekend cast the drug in a pretty dim light, waded into the online fray yesterday. He was responding to [...]

In San Francisco, Health Care Shows Up on Restaurant Bills

Eating out in San Francisco? Besides the tip, you’ll have to figure in the cost of health care.
The city’s health-care mandate is now showing up as a surcharge on some restaurant bills, MarketWatch reports.
Since the beginning of the year, San Francisco businesses have been required to offer health insurance to employees or pay a fee [...]

The Hospital Nobody Wants

A money-losing hospital in a blue-collar Illinois suburb is closing because the nonprofit group that runs it couldn’t find a buyer at any price, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The St. Francis Hospital & Health Center in Blue Island has lost $40 million since 2000, and the red ink is flowing faster all the time. Half the [...]

Journal Reports Tobacco Money & GE Royalties in Lung Cancer Study

The New England Journal of Medicine yesterday caught up with a bit of full-disclosure housekeeping, publishing a correction and a clarification to describe a few funding and conflict-of-interest details from a lung cancer screening study the journal published in 2006.
The correction said the authors had received royalties from General Electric, which sells the type of [...]

Toddlers Born Prematurely Could Benefit from Autism Screening

Toddlers born prematurely show more signs of autism on a screening test than children born at full term, according to a study that appears in the journal Pediatrics. iStockphoto In this study, which had a relatively small sample of 91 kids, 26% scored failed the autism screener. But having some autistic-like features is not the same [...]

After Tax Breaks, Big Pharma Lays Off NJ Workers

New Jersey has given more than $65 million in subsidies to Bristol-Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Novartis in the name of economic development over the past 11 years. Recently, the three drug makers have turned around and laid off employees in the Garden State. Was that a fair deal? Sarah Stecker, a policy analyst at New [...]

Consumer Group Says TV Drug Ads Should Carry FDA’s Number

Consumers Union wants drug makers to make it easier for you to let the FDA know if you’ve had problems with a prescription drug. So the advocacy group petitioned the FDA to require that TV drug ads include a toll-free number and Web site address that patients can use to report serious side effects to [...]

WellPoint Won’t Pay for ‘Never Events’

Customer-service principles that consumers take for granted in other parts of their daily lives are still often lacking in health care. And so it goes for paying for mistakes.
Find a fly in your soup, the restaurant is likely to erase the bill. But have a botched knee surgery, and the hospital is likely to charge [...]

Cigna Eases Restrictions on Alternatives to Vytorin

Since the controversy over the effectiveness of Vytorin erupted, health insurers haven’t rushed to downgrade their coverage of the cholesterol drug. But Cigna now says it’s suspending its requirements for certain patients to try Vytorin, jointly sold by Merck and Schering-Plough, before trying alternatives, such as Pfizer’s Lipitor and AstraZeneca’s Crestor.
Vytorin remains on the second [...]

Home Defibrillators May Not Be Worth Their Cost

Buying a defibrillator for the home may not provide much benefit to consumers, according to results of a clinical trial that were released yesterday.
Defibrillators can provide life-saving jolts of electricity to heart attack victims. But it turned out that participants in the study who had family members trained in CPR, but no defibrillator at home, [...]

Say Hello to ‘Dr. Nurse’

For those who get nervous or squeamish about the idea of performing “mouth to mouth” resuscitation, the American Heart Association now says “hands only” CPR is A-OK. The AHA said hands-only CPR is “a potentially lifesaving option to be used by people not trained in conventional CPR or those who are unsure of their ability to [...]

Heart Association Endorses ‘Hands Only’ CPR

For those who get nervous or squeamish about the idea of performing “mouth to mouth” resuscitation, the American Heart Association now says “hands only” CPR is A-OK. The AHA said hands-only CPR is “a potentially lifesaving option to be used by people not trained in conventional CPR or those who are unsure of their ability to [...]

The Other Side of the Vytorin Email Story

There’s more to the testy emails from cardiologist John Kastelein to Schering-Plough over the handling of the controversial study of cholesterol drug Vytorin. And now we can peek at the rest.
Today the Merck/Schering-Plough joint venture that sells Vytorin made public more details of an email exchange that drew attention yesterday when Sen. Chuck Grassley released [...]

Doctor Ratings Get a Boost

Could the tug of war over doctor ratings be coming to an end?
Somehow the Health Blog doubts it. But there does seem to be progress toward a truce. The WSJ reports today that folks who have been pulling on different ends of the rating rope are coming out with a framework to [...]

Marketing of Anemia Drugs Back in the Congressional Spotlight

Between Congressional inquiries into Vytorin and anemia drugs, the folks on Capitol Hill are keeping Big Pharma jumping. The House Committee on Energy and Commerce yesterday asked Amgen and Johnson & Johnson to hand over more documents involving questionable marketing of anemia fighters (brand names Aranesp, Procrit and Epogen) to consumers and to doctors.
The committee [...]

Doctors Lobby Against Medicare Payment Cuts

Every so often, the Health Blog puts in a phone call to the Medical Group Management Association, a trade group for medical practices. Practically every time we hear the same dire warning: Physicians will cut back on care for Medicare patients because of impending cuts in payment. iStockphoto Turns out we’re not the only ones who [...]

Roche’s Good-Cholesterol Booster Looks Promising

Swiss drug giant Roche said today that its experimental drug for raising good cholesterol didn’t trip any safety alarms in a mid-stage clinical test. That passes for good news because the drug, code-named R1658, is in the same class as Pfizer’s doomed blockbuster wanna-be torcetrapib, which failed a couple years ago because more people on [...]

The Search is on for Alternatives to Drug Ingredients from Animals

Sen. Chuck Grassley lobbed another round of letters at Merck and Schering-Plough today, asking the companies to explain their handling of the results of a disappointing clinical test of cholesterol drug Vytorin. The latest missives to the companies from Grassley (R-Iowa) came just a day after Vytorin took a beating at the annual scientific meeting [...]