Three-year Pulitzer-nominated investigation into the FDA
Part I: The Deadly Secrets Behind “Breakthrough” Alzheimer’s Drugs
New Alzheimer’s Drugs Shrink Your Brain — Is That Bad?
What Alzheimer’s Drugs Do Inside Your Skull
Part II: FDA Approved — And Ineffective (an analysis of 10 years of data)
Part III: Science For Sale: How Drugmakers Captured The FDA
When the Cure is the Cause: The Curious Case of Green Hairy Tongue Undark and Smithsonian Magazines (A cautionary tale about a paralyzing and deadly disease that swept the world in the 1950s- 70s.)
Donanemab: Conflicts of interest found in FDA committee that approved new Alzheimer’s drug (The new alzheimer’s drug, money and bad, bad science)
Should regulatory authorities approve drugs based on surrogate endpoints? The BMJ
The FDA is Still Letting the FDA Implant Untested Devices in Our Bodies Washington Post
Can Your Hip Replacement Kill You? New York Times. January 13, 2019.
The Human Toll of the Medical Industry's Uncharitable Giving Undark December 20, 2018
Why we can’t trust clinical guidelines The BMJ June 2013 (click link and scroll down for free access full text pdf)
How I learned about “trade secret deaths.” When Traci Johnson was found hanging dead in a Eli Lilly’s Pharma laboratory—it pulled back the bed covers on a dirty secret at FDA: when pharma or device makers declare the deaths of patients injured during clinical trials as “confidential, commercial information,” the FDA honors their secret.
How threats by industry weakened one of the few previously independent agencies, which evaluates medical interventions, and how the USPSTF has subsequently issued guidelines that a number of experts say are contributing to overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
Written with widely respected cancer doctor and methodologist, Vinay Prasad, this article reviews the failure of many cancer screening tests to “save lives”
The ugly (and true) history of the FDA’s rejection of advisors who raised concerns about drug and device safety while relying on advisors with ties to industry:
Little known to the public and even to some CDC employees, the CDC takes money from industry and promotes their commercial messaging. Examples given.
Several organisations have recommended greatly expanded screening for hepatitis C infection.
Why the majority of neurosurgeons said they would continue complying with a guideline they believed was useless at best and deadly at worst
Journalists often forget that conflicts of interest may bias the opinions of their expert sources. Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee explain how, in an attempt to disentangle commercial messages from science, they have compiled a list of nearly 100 independent medical experts to whom reporters can turn
When doctors recommend tests, drugs or surgeries to prevent bad outcomes (think cholesterol-lowering agents to prevent strokes or cardiac stents to prevent heart attacks) they tap into our deepest sense of what constitutes common sense: An ounce of prevention. Catch it early. A stitch in time.
A panel of independent experts reports this week that drugs used to treat mild cases of high blood pressure have not been shown to reduce heart attacks, strokes, or overall deaths.
As chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society, Otis Webb Brawley — who is also a professor of oncology and epidemiology at Emory University — is the public face of the cancer establishment.
After revelations that the CDC is receiving some funding from industry, Jeanne Lenzer investigates how it might have affected the organisation’s decisions
Despite repeated calls to prohibit or limit conflicts of interests among authors and sponsors of clinical guidelines, the problem persists.
Spin doctors soft pedal data on antihypertensives
BMJ
A Pharma marketing executive explains how money trumps facts when bad news about drugs comes out, and see how a massive study by NIH showed no benefit for statins.