Updated– Last year, in what may have been an unprecedented action, a paper on the effects of Transcendental Mediation (TM) in African Americans was withdrawn by the editors only 12 minutes before the paper’s scheduled publication in Archives of Internal Medicine. No definitive explanation was ever provided, though the editors and authors said that the action…
Don Poldermans And The Dutch Research Scandal
October 15, 2012 by 4 Comments
The publication last week of the final report from the Erasmus Medical Center on the Don Poldermans research scandal in the Netherlands ends the first and most explosive chapter of an ugly episode of scientific misconduct. But there are still many important questions regarding scientific integrity and the culture of medical research raised by the case. And…
Walking With the American Heart Association: Valerie Bertinelli and Chester Cheetah
September 30, 2012 by 1 Comment
A few weeks ago Chester Cheetah, the official mascot for Frito Lay’s Cheetos, played an official part in the American Heart Association’s Dallas Heart Walk. Yoni Freedhoff, on his Weighty Matters blog, pretty much says what needs to be said about this disgraceful association between Frito Lay and the AHA. This weekend I received a press kit…
News Flash! Company Issues Incredibly Boring Press Release
September 14, 2012 by 1 Comment
Last week Abiomed issued a press release (reprinted below) that was about as dull as a press release can get. The main news of the press release was that the PROTECT II study testing the company’s Impella 2.5 circulatory support device had been published online in Circulation. The press release provides no details or information about…
Good Science/Bad Science: Contrasting Papers On Dietary Compositon In JAMA And BMJ
June 27, 2012 by 3 Comments
Two studies published on Tuesday on dietary composition offer a striking contrast. One tackles the interesting question of whether different diets producing the same amount of weight loss might have different effects on energy expenditure. The investigators performed a rigorous, carefully designed experiment that advances our knowledge about diets and metabolism. The second tackled an…
You Know Nothing, Dr. Snow: Why Medicine Can’t Be More Like Facebook
May 18, 2012 by 3 Comments
Medicine can never be like Facebook, despite what Matt Herper argues over at Forbes. Perhaps he was just trolling for hits on a day when everyone is thinking about the Facebook IPO, but Herper proposed, with apparently seriousness, that medicine needs to model itself on the tech world in order to match the kind of…
Politics and Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement
May 4, 2012 by 2 Comments
From the first early stages of its development, the prospect of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) provoked two broad and competing fears: Regulatory safeguards would kill a promising new technology, denying its life-saving benefits to many thousands of desperately sick people. The stampede to stake a claim in a promising, highly lucrative new territory would…
Half the News That’s Fit To Print: NY Times On ECG Screening For Student Athletes
May 1, 2012 by 6 Comments
There may be no more horrifying medical catastrophe than the sudden death of a young athlete on the playing field in front of a large crowd of friends, family, and community. But it’s also a dizzyingly complex subject with no easy solutions. Experts are divided. The American Heart Association recently reaffirmed that it does not recommend…
Mark Midei Can’t Get a Job Taking Blood Pressure At A Walmart
April 8, 2012 by 9 Comments
Earlier this year I had the extraordinary experience of spending several hours on the phone with Mark Midei, the poster-boy (or scapegoat, depending on whom you ask) for all that’s wrong with interventional cardiology in the US. I approached the conversation with some trepidation and discomfort. I’d followed his story closely– but not obsessively– and…
Letter From Jail: A Cautionary Tale
December 18, 2011 by 1 Comment
CardioBrief reprints a letter from a friend in jail. Are there lessons to be learned from it?
…
Industry & Medicine: It’s Complicated
October 7, 2011 by 3 Comments
Some people think industry exerts a uniformly negative force on medicine, or at least that’s the only aspect they focus on when they write or talk about the issue. Others focus exclusively on the beneficial effects of industry, and exhibit amnesia in their failure to recall the numerous instances in recent years in which the…
Understanding Risk: Tricky Business
June 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Editor’s Note: The attached article (click on the image to download the PDF) about understanding risk was originally published in the Harvard Health Letter in 1994. I recently stumbled across it in my archives and thought some readers here might enjoy it. Although it is directed at a consumer and not a professional audience, I…
Part 1: The National Lipid Association and the FH Guidelines
May 17, 2011 by 7 Comments
Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series on the National Lipid Association. This first part focuses on the NLA’s publication of a series of papers offering expert guidance on familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) and raises serious questions about the role of industry in the documents. The second part explores additional questions about the…
ACC CEO Jack Lewin Provides The Argument Against Industry Money
May 6, 2011 by 3 Comments
The ACC’s CEO Jack Lewin may have put forth the single best and most concise argument against industry funding of medical societies. Here’s what Lewin told ProPublica: The “circus element” of the exhibit booths doesn’t unduly influence attendees, Lewin said. “I don’t buy a soft drink just because of the advertising… I buy it because…
$50K: The Price For A VIP Dinner For 2 With The Cleveland Clinic CEO
April 19, 2011 by 1 Comment
Want to have dinner with Delos Cosgrove, the cardiac surgeon who’s the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic? Just sign up for a platinum sponsorship of the Cleveland Clinic’s 2011 Medical Innovation Summit and you’ll receive an invitation “to attend the private VIP dinner hosted by Cleveland Clinic CEO & President, Delos Cosgrove, MD.” The cost…
WebMD: the 800 Pound Gorilla in the Room
February 7, 2011 by 2 Comments
There’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere and twittersphere about Virginia Heffernan’s column in the New York Times magazine on Sunday comparing WebMD very unfavorably to MayoClinic.Com. Heffernan makes a fairly simple point: because of WebMD’s “(admitted) connections to pharmaceutical and other companies,” the site is “permeated with pseudomedicine and subtle misinformation.” Because…
Blue light special: AAA screening at Kmart in the disease-mongering aisle
September 15, 2010 by 9 Comments
Now, in addition to all the other stuff there, you can go to Kmart and get screened for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). Some people will even receive free ultrasound tests. The new program, from the Find the AAAnswers Coalition, was announced on Friday. It’s a perfect example of disease mongering, the selling of a sickness…
At the Dallas valve meeting even the faculty is for sale
August 4, 2010 by 6 Comments
[August 6 Update: the Industry Prospectus discussed below has been removed from the DLIV 2010 website. You can download an archived copy here.] Company banners, ads in program books, sponsored badge holders, headrests on buses with company logos– these are just a few of the commercial items to be found at medical meetings these days….
“Is it safe?”
July 25, 2010 by 1 Comment
Is it safe? Like the Nazi dentist played by Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, we all want an answer to the question: is it safe? And like the poor victim played by Dustin Hoffman, you can torture us as much as you want but we can’t answer the question if we don’t have the data….
Avandia aftermath: who are the winners and losers?
July 16, 2010 by 6 Comments
Responses to the Avandia panel have been all over the map, as cleverly noted on the Wall Street Journal health blog. Avandia is “dead” (Forbes), or, perhaps worse, “now a Zombie” (BNET). By contrast, others thought the panel granted Avandia a “reprieve” (Wall Street Journal and that Avandia would now probably be allowed to stay on…
Why was an Abbott marketing study published in the American Journal of Cardiology?
July 2, 2010 by 4 Comments
(Updated on July 7 with a lengthy quote from AJC editor William Roberts.) The authors call it “an in-office linguistic study” and write that it “was conducted to assess physician–patient discussions of mixed dyslipidemia.” But it’s really an Abbott marketing study for Niaspan, the company’s long-acting niacin product, and the question is: why is it published…
The wealth gap: are cardiologists’ high salaries standing in the way of primary care?
May 4, 2010 by 2 Comments
High salaries for cardiologists and other specialists lead to an overwhelming lifetime advantage in wealth accumulation, according to a new study appearing in Health Affairs. That advantage may play a decisive role in the choice of medical careers, say Kevin Schulman and his colleagues in their article, “Can We Close The Income And Wealth Gap…
Pieces of a puzzle: Multaq, Sanofi, ACC, HRS, Prystowsky, AF Guidelines
March 25, 2010 by 10 Comments
CardioBrief today dispenses with its usual format. Our post today is a puzzle. Here are the various pieces of the puzzle: Puzzle Piece 1: The commercial prospects of Multaq (dronedarone) appear increasingly cloudy, according to a news report by Jim Edwards on bnet.com. Wall Street estimates for the drug, which some had thought might reach € 3…
Why is there a red dress on diet Coke cans?
March 22, 2010 by 9 Comments
I have a question for the NHLBI: why is there a red dress on diet Coke cans? But before raising the question, let’s step back for a moment. Last Tuesday at the ACC Bob Harrington and Steve Nissen debated each other (and, occasionally, the audience) over the subject of conflicts of interest in medicine. The…
Braunwald: “In all fairness, what was OK three years ago is not OK now.”
January 4, 2010 by 1 Comment
A new policy from Partners Healthcare that limits compensation to doctors from industry is provoking lots of discussion (see below), at least in part because of a story in the New York Times by Duff Wilson. (Click here to read the press release Partners issued last April. Click here to read the full report.) One…
Recent Comments