Saturday, May 19, 2012
major trial of epoetin misled the medical community about the anemia drug’s risks and benefits-and helped make Amgen rich
http://the-scientist.com/2012/05/14/opinion-misleading-drug-trials/
Qld doctor accused of killing patients
Police in Queensland will this week be asked to launch a murder investigation into claims a doctor killed patients.
Former independent Queensland MP Rob Messenger gave taped interviews of a former colleague of the doctor to media and the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC).
On the tape, the whistleblower doctor accuses his former colleague of at least two killings.
One of the incidents involved oxygen being turned down on a patient on life support, which prematurely killed the woman against her wishes.
On another occasion, a surgeon had to restrain the doctor for 15 minutes to stop him from hurting a patient.
"He was prepared to kill people if it saved his authority from being questioned," the doctor said in the recording.
Health Minister Lawrence Springborg said that the doctor was still employed by Queensland Health but had been separated from patients.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10805741
Former independent Queensland MP Rob Messenger gave taped interviews of a former colleague of the doctor to media and the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC).
On the tape, the whistleblower doctor accuses his former colleague of at least two killings.
One of the incidents involved oxygen being turned down on a patient on life support, which prematurely killed the woman against her wishes.
On another occasion, a surgeon had to restrain the doctor for 15 minutes to stop him from hurting a patient.
"He was prepared to kill people if it saved his authority from being questioned," the doctor said in the recording.
Health Minister Lawrence Springborg said that the doctor was still employed by Queensland Health but had been separated from patients.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/health/news/article.cfm?c_id=204&objectid=10805741
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Retractions (fraud) on the rise in scienific journals
Get Science News From The New York Times »
Source: Journal of Medical Ethics
The highest “retraction index” in the study went to one of the world’s leading medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine. In a statement for this article, it questioned the study’s methodology, noting that it considered only papers with abstracts, which are included in a small fraction of studies published in each issue. “Because our denominator was low, the index was high,” the statement said.
In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-retractions-prompts-calls-for-reform.html?_r=2&src=dayp&pagewanted=all
too many bioethicists are being funded by Big Pharma
Gadfly: a person who annoys or criticizes others in order to provoke them into action (Oxford English Dictionary). There is no better word to describe Carl Elliott, a University of Minnesota bioethicist who is probably the profession’s most savage critic. In his column in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, he returned to a favourite theme: the dangers of cosying up to the pharmaceutical industry. He complains that too many bioethicists are being funded by Big Pharma, which Dr Elliott tends to describe as a Mafia network.
He writes:
He writes:
“If there is anything surprising about the upsurge in pharma-funded bioethics, it is that it has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in criminal behavior by the pharmaceutical industry: fraud, illegal marketing, ghostwriting, tax evasion, kickbacks, and bribery…
“Apparently, many bioethicists see nothing unseemly about sharing in profits generated by criminal activity. In fact, the bioethicists working with industry are often among the most prominent in the field. If anything, an association with the pharmaceutical industry has become a mark of professional success. What does this say about the future of bioethics?”
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10056
behavioral therapy, psychiatry, shock therapy
A controversy has erupted in Massachusetts over the use of skin shock therapy for troubled teenagers. The Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in the suburb of Canton is a facility for people with severe emotional, behavioural and psychiatric problems, including autism. It is the only institution in the US which uses shock therapy – a 2-second application to the skin which feels like a pinch, or, its critics say, a bee sting. About half of its 250 students are treated this way.
This week, a graphic video from 2002 showing a restrained teenager screaming in pain while staff administered 31 shocks galvanised opponents into obtaining more than 200,000 signatures on a on-line petition to state legislators – although it included only 9,000 Massachusetts residents.
The JRC claims that its intensive behavioural therapies have successfully “treated the most difficult behaviours in the nation, often children and young adults who had been confined to psychiatric hospitals because their behaviour disorders could not be effectively treated”. It argues that the shocks are only given after a court and a child’s parents have approved. The alternative, it says, is drugging children and warehousing them in a mental hospital – which is a kind of torture.
Its critics say that electric shock therapy is the kind of torture would not be allowed in a prison. They have even managed to get the Manfred Nowak, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, to ask the US government to investigate the institution. "Of course here they might say, but this is for a good purpose because it is for medical treatment,” Nowak told ABC in 2010. “But even for a good purpose -- because the same is to get from a terrorist information about a future attack, is a good purpose. To get from a criminal a confession is a good purpose.
A health writer in Time magazine, Maia Szalavitz, has written a book on the troubled-teen industry. She is a bitter critic of the JRC and says that it has never published a single peer-reviewed paper which demonstrates that the technique is successful. She dismisses glowing reports from parents as mere anecdotes.
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10060
This week, a graphic video from 2002 showing a restrained teenager screaming in pain while staff administered 31 shocks galvanised opponents into obtaining more than 200,000 signatures on a on-line petition to state legislators – although it included only 9,000 Massachusetts residents.
The JRC founder, Matthew L. Israel, a behavioural psychologist who trained with Harvard’s B.F. Skinner, was forced to step down last year over an incident in which staff gave two teenagers dozens of shocks after receiving orders from a prank phone call.
In the heat of claim and counter-claim, it is hard to know whether the therapy is mild and helpful or severe and abusive.The JRC claims that its intensive behavioural therapies have successfully “treated the most difficult behaviours in the nation, often children and young adults who had been confined to psychiatric hospitals because their behaviour disorders could not be effectively treated”. It argues that the shocks are only given after a court and a child’s parents have approved. The alternative, it says, is drugging children and warehousing them in a mental hospital – which is a kind of torture.
Its critics say that electric shock therapy is the kind of torture would not be allowed in a prison. They have even managed to get the Manfred Nowak, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Torture, to ask the US government to investigate the institution. "Of course here they might say, but this is for a good purpose because it is for medical treatment,” Nowak told ABC in 2010. “But even for a good purpose -- because the same is to get from a terrorist information about a future attack, is a good purpose. To get from a criminal a confession is a good purpose.
A health writer in Time magazine, Maia Szalavitz, has written a book on the troubled-teen industry. She is a bitter critic of the JRC and says that it has never published a single peer-reviewed paper which demonstrates that the technique is successful. She dismisses glowing reports from parents as mere anecdotes.
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10060
"Alarming cracks” in the edifice of science
The New York Times highlights the belief of the editor of the journal Infection and Immunity, Ferric C. Fang, that a ten-fold increase in the number of retractions over the past ten years is a symptom of "a dysfunctional scientific climate". And in an opinion piece in Nature, the co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, Daniel Sarewitz, speaks darkly of "alarming cracks" in the scientific edifice which are eroding public trust.
Dr Fang recently issued a call for root-and-branch reform in an eloquent editorial in his journal.
"The present system," he writes, "provides ... potent incentives for behaviors that are detrimental to science and scientists." "You can't afford to fail, to have your hypothesis disproven," Dr. Fang told the Times. "It's a small minority of scientists who engage in frank misconduct. It's a much more insidious thing that you feel compelled to put the best face on everything."
Dr Sarewitz also calls for change to eliminate bias. "Science's internal controls on bias [are] failing, and bias and error [are] trending in the same direction -- towards the pervasive over-selection and over-reporting of false positive results." Significantly for bioethics, he says that "the cracks in the edifice are showing up first in the biomedical realm, because research results are constantly put to the practical test of improving human health".
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10059
Dr Fang recently issued a call for root-and-branch reform in an eloquent editorial in his journal.
"The present system," he writes, "provides ... potent incentives for behaviors that are detrimental to science and scientists." "You can't afford to fail, to have your hypothesis disproven," Dr. Fang told the Times. "It's a small minority of scientists who engage in frank misconduct. It's a much more insidious thing that you feel compelled to put the best face on everything."
Dr Sarewitz also calls for change to eliminate bias. "Science's internal controls on bias [are] failing, and bias and error [are] trending in the same direction -- towards the pervasive over-selection and over-reporting of false positive results." Significantly for bioethics, he says that "the cracks in the edifice are showing up first in the biomedical realm, because research results are constantly put to the practical test of improving human health".
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/10059
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