Is Your Doctor Getting Cash Payouts from Big Pharma?

Are doctors prescribing pharmaceuticals for their patients' benefit or for their own financial benefit? It may be the latter, says Mark Sisson.

... A public interest group, ProPublica, in partnership with Consumer Reports and National Public Radio have compiled and released a series of reports assessing the pharmaceutical companies’ payouts to doctors and the public’s discomfort with their physicians’ industry ties.

Although the industry’s financial dealings are still private material, lawsuits aimed at Pharma’s marketing have required many of the larger companies to disclose much of their payout information. Although the details are scattered in public websites and documents, ProPublica compiled the information from these various resources. The result? A list of 17,000 doctors and $257 million dollars in payout. Additionally, the organization found that hundreds of physicians on the Pharma payroll lacked board certifications in their claimed fields or had been sanctioned by state medical boards for unprofessional (and in some cases heinous) behavior. Read more

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Posted in: Big Pharma,medical malpractice,pharmaceutical companies,pharmaceuticals

Stop Memory Loss Caused by Big Pharma

Though memory loss is often part of the aging process, in some cases it's caused by prescription medications. The symptoms are reversible - if they are caught early enough.

When Jane Simpson’s mother, then 91, started showing signs of memory loss in December 2007, Ms. Simpson thought age had finally caught up with her. “As this had been a gradual process, and considering her age, we were not unduly alarmed — just saddened that it seemed we were losing my mother mentally,” she wrote in an e-mail to this blog.

But on a visit six months later, Ms. Simpson, a 61-year-old advertising copywriter in North Carolina, was struck by how much worse her mother’s memory loss had become and by her confusion about everything happening around her.

Just typical 91-year-old behavior? Just the first signs of the inevitable slide toward dementia we all may face if we live long enough? Not at all.

Since the ’70s, geriatric specialists have been aware of many unusual causes of memory loss, confusion and disorientation in older people. These include not just medical conditions ranging from urinary tract infection to hydrocephalus to the flu, but also side effects from many commonly used medications. Read more

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Posted in: Big Pharma,dementia,memory loss,pharmaceutical companies,pharmaceuticals,senility