We’ve touched on some of the many disturbing things that happened during the clinical trial on which Dan Markingson committed suicide. In my first post, I asked how a psychotic, homicidal patient who was involuntarily hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital could give an informed consent for participation in a clinical trial. There appeared to have [...]

There are many disturbing things that happened during the clinical trial on which Dan Markingson committed suicide. Besides the issue of consent, or lack thereof, which I raised in my last post, one of the most disturbing aspects to me has been the lack of accountability and the apparent violations of clinical practice standards, with [...]

  The suicide of Dan Markingson, a 26 year old man participating in a psychiatric trial, has again made the news, and will serve us for a life-time of study and discussion of research ethics, along with the TeGenero and Jesse Gelsinger cases.   Markingson began to show signs of paranoia and delusions in 2003, [...]

Sometimes I feel like Alice in Wonderland, staring into distorting mirrors. The ongoing fight over Plan B has again precipitated this disquieting feeling. There is such a disconnect between some stated outcomes that are claimed as being desirable and actions that don’t support that. In this case, probably most people would agree that elective abortions [...]

32 deaths. 461 cases…and counting. Unless you live under a rock, you probably know about the nationwide outbreak of an unusual fungal meningitis caused by Exserohilum rostratum, a plant fungus. The outbreak is now linked to a single pharmacy in Massachusetts, New England Compounding Center (NECC), which compounded a variety of drugs used for injection, [...]

I was attending World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants 24th Annual International Conference in Cleveland last week, when my aunt, herself a survivor, handed me a copy of Newsweek with a cover article, “The Nazis and Thalidomide: The Worst Drug Scandal of All Time.” The story was prompted by the [...]

Although I’ve been busy traveling again, the struggle of the Boothbay peninsula communities to keep their hospital remains constantly on my mind. I’ve written two letters to the editor of the Boothbay Register*, which I am reproducing here to update my readers, as this is an example of broader David and Goliath healthcare struggles and [...]

Until recently, my formal education in statistics was largely Darryl Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics” and, more recently, Marya Zilberberg’s “Between the Lines” (reviewed here). I find that stats, with difficult concepts to retain, requires repetition. The difficulty is compounded by the overwhelming amount of information and difficulty keeping up with medical literature, let [...]

This is “Breast Cancer Awareness” month, the much-hyped recognition of a serious problem that we should be conscious of throughout the year. The associated “pink ribbon” campaign sometimes feels akin to a “Hallmark holiday” sales gimmick, rather than recognition of the pain of breast cancer and need for further research. Carmen Gonzalez just had a [...]

Last week I focused on drug advertisement for “Low T” catching up with all the attention given to menopausal women with declining hormones. But women still are the primary targets for pharmaceutical advertising, in part because they can be captured for multiple products—if not quite from the cradle, at least from puberty, through pregnancy, to [...]