Round the blogosphere
Thanks to Envisioning 2.0 for pointing us to Mark Senak’s Eye on the FDA blog. Envisioning found his breakdown of the presidential candidates’ health care and pharmaceutical platforms super-interesting, and so did we.
Another interesting blog we’ve recently run across is The HIV/AIDS Shill Factor, http://shillfactor.net (Howard Brody wrote about it here.)
The epigraph is tiny font in parentheses, but the message is bold:
(If you were bringing in an additional $50,000-$100,000 a year with very little effort, shuttling about rich countries extoling the merits of lifelong polypharmacy to clinicians less clever, less compeling than yourself — loads of fancy dinners & hotels, business class travel, furtive financial exchanges, would you stray from the script?)
The rest of the text on the site is a bit small, too, but PostScript appreciates the simplicity of the format and the detail sorted into categories of who: Who controls research, who votes on new drugs, who sets treatment specs, who educates the field on HIV/AIDS….Though medical conflicts of interest are complex creatures, being up front about them isn’t — it’s essential.
As we browsed through the Arial 10 pt. font lists of “Paid consulting for” “speaking fees from” and “stock ownership,” we couldn’t help but think: If these guys and gals did this with a word processor and the internet, can’t be too much trouble to ask researchers and doctors to do it, too.