#badpharma

Ambulon swallowed, looking away.

He had hoped it was over. He had hoped his past was finally behind him and he could just... look forward from now on.

“Yeah. I did.”

Send ✪ for my character to reveal how they feel about yours.

He expects this will be relatively mutual. 

❖   POSITIVE —

I think you’re awesome ║ I like you ║ I want to go on a date with you ║  I love you ║ You’re cute/handsome ║ I want to marry you ║ You’re attractive ║ I wish we could spend more time together ║ I’d like to get to know you better? ║ I admire you ║ You’re someone that I look up to ║ You’re very kind ║ I consider us friends ║ I secretly have a crush on you ║ I have high respect for you ║ We have common interests ║ I’m happy that I met you

❖   NEGATIVE —

In Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Pharma: how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients, he discusses how secrecy, dishonestly, bribery and corruption are in heavy rotation in the Pharma industry. In this brief peer review I found written by Humphrey Rang he summarizes the book and notes key examples that help each element of interest. The main issue in the book is the nondisclosure of data from clinical trials. The example is the antidepressant reboxetine who published one trial to be successful while the other six remained unpublished because they didn’t produce the outcome that was desirable. As a result patients suffered major side effects due to its inefficiency.

here is an additional resource that lists all the side effects of Reboxtine

http://sideeffects.embl.de/drugs/65856/pt

The second main idea of the book is aimed to criticize marketing culture of the Pharma companies, its intrusion into medical education and its influence on prescribing patterns. What is scary about this is that scientists, doctors and regulators support this. From the reading “companies spend about twice as much on marketing as they do on research and development of new drugs” (p.). Much of this is done under the name of ‘research’ but in fact it’s done for marketing purposes. An example complimenting this is the CAST (cardiac arrhythmia suppression trial) antiarrythmic drug trial. Drugs likes encainide and flecainide, which are support to treat irregular heartbeats, actually increased deaths following a heart attack. Over 100,000 people unnecessarily died from this. 

i draw the line at profanity *unsubscribed*

She tended not to think herself a very good person, but she knew she was at least a competent medic. But even that confidence flew out the window whenever he came about. She could have shivered from the cold his shadow over her projected, but instead Reviver bowed her head, shoulders taut. She hadn’t done anything wrong, not by a long shot, yet there was this nagging feeling she was about to be scolded.