The March of Legal Settlements Continues into 2015 - Daiichi Sankyo Settles Charges of Kickbacks to Doctors for $39 Million
We are just into January and have our first legal settlement by a major health care corporation of charges of giving physicians kickbacks to spur use of a commercial product. Like most such stories, this one got little notice. The most extensive report was in Ed Silverman's PharmaLot blog on the Wall Street Journal site.The Summary and Allegations The basic summary...Daiichi Sankyo agreed to pay $39 million to the U.S. federal government and state Medicaid programs to settle allegations of paying kickbacks to physicians to prescribe several of its drugs. The allegations were ...that Daiichi initiated different...
Source: Health Care Renewal - January 13, 2015 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest corporate integrity agreement Daiichi Sankyo impunity kickbacks legal settlements Source Type: blogs
Drip, Drip, Drip - the Steady Accumulation of Little Cases Pointing to Big Problems
Sometimes an apparently insignificant noise can signal a big problem, like the sound of dripping water in a room with no visible plumbing.Today, I noticed a few short stories in the media about one relatively small legal settlement involving a medical device company. It initially seemed to be too insignificant a settlement to merit a comment. A closer look, however, suggested links to to other larger issues. This story reminded me about other apparently small cases that are mostly ignored, but remind us of bigger problems.Biomet Settles Kickback Allegations for $6 Million - the Index CaseHere are the main...
Source: Health Care Renewal - October 31, 2014 Category: Health Management Tags: Arthrocare Baxano Surgical Biomet crime deception Endogastric Solutions fraud Globus Medical impunity Johnson and Johnson kickbacks legal settlements marketing medical devices Nipro Zimmer Source Type: blogs
Can Meditation Help You Become Wolverine?
When I started meditating 7 years or so ago I was reluctant to tell anybody about my guilty little secret, including my family.
After all, meditation was weird because how on earth could just sitting quietly achieve anything other than giving you a sore arse and maybe piles?
Only strange people meditated.
People who wore sandals a lot, stroked whales, raved over recipes using tofu and burned a lot of incense and other assorted legal and not-quite-so-legal herbs.
Normal people didn’t meditate.
I mean, why on earth would they? Where was the payoff?
Then the research started to trickle in.
At first it seemed like once i...
Source: Life Coach Blog: The Discomfort Zone : - August 27, 2014 Category: Life Coaches Authors: Tim Brownson Tags: Life Coaching Source Type: blogs
EU To Fine J&J And Novartis Over A Pay-To-Delay Deal
One year after filing a complaint against Johnson & Johnson and Novartis (NVS) - and its Sandoz generic subsidiary - for allegedly conspiring to delay the generic introduction of a prescription drug in the Netherlands, the European Commission is set to fine the drugmakers, Reuters writes. The medicine that has been the subject of their probe is a version of the fentanyl pain patch.
A fine has been expected after European antitrust regulators opened their two years ago as part of a widening crackdown on such deals (back story). The concern has picked up steam in recent years as governments attempt to grapple with rising...
Source: Pharmalot - November 25, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: esilverman Source Type: blogs
MKSAP: 61-year-old woman with hot flushes
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians.
A 61-year-old woman is evaluated for hot flushes, which have been persistent for the last 10 years. They occur at least 7 times per day, last for approximately 60 seconds, and are associated with severe sweating, palpitations, and occasional nausea. She is awakened several times per night. She has tried herbal medications, including soy and black cohosh, but has not experienced any benefit. She has hypertension, type 2 diabetes mellitus, and hyperlipidemia. Five years ago, she developed deep venous thrombosis af...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 16, 2013 Category: Family Physicians Tags: Conditions Heart Medications OB/GYN Source Type: blogs
Trip Rapid Review worked example - SSRIs and the management of hot flashes
We reported 0.31 but what does that mean? I favour trying to assign various narratives based on the score, for instance:1 >> 0.5 = Intervention is highly likely to be beneficial.0.49 >> 0.25 = Intervention is likely to be beneficial.0.24 >> -0.24 = Evidence is weak or ambiguous.-0.25 >> -0.49 = Intervention is unlikely to be beneficial.-0.5 >> -1 = Intervention is highly unlikely to be beneficial.But these could be modified based on the number of trials. For instance scores based on multiple trials is likely to be more reliable than those based on a few.Trip Rapid Reviews is ...
Source: Liberating the literature - October 2, 2013 Category: Technology Consultants Source Type: blogs
Forest Hires A Fred Hassan Protege To Replace Solomon As CEO
After months of anticipation, Forest Laboratories has finally hired someone to succeed the embattled Howard Solomon. And the winner is… Brent Saunders, a former Schering-Plough exec who has been a Forest director for the past two years and was ceo at Bausch + Lomb, but became available after the eye-care company was purchased by Valeant Pharmaceuticals for $8.7 billion a few months ago.
“We have long thought Brent would be an ideal ceo to succeed Howard when the time came. Over the course of our announced search and rigorous board process, during which we seriously evaluated a number of excellent candidates, this belie...
Source: Pharmalot - September 10, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: esilverman Source Type: blogs
Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime by Peter Gøtzsche
'The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don't sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. This is what makes drugs so different from anything else in life...Virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors...the reason patients trust their medicine is that they extrapolate the trust they have in their doctors into the medicines they prescribe. The patients don't realise that, although their doctors may know a lot about diseases and human physiology and psychology, they know very, very little about drugs that hasn't been carefully concocted and...
Source: PharmaGossip - September 1, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Q/A – Suggestions from recovery alcoholics and spouses of alcoholics?
You guys might also have this question so I’m posting it here with a good answer too. It comes from ‘MomOf2′ who asks:
My husband is a recovering alcoholic of alomst 6 months now. \he’s not the type of alcoholic to drink everyday, he’s a benge drinker. This is the first time that he has been sober this long. Last summer I left him the last time he did it and he moved out of state and I stayed here with our daughter and eventually moved on. As time went by he begged me and begged me to come back to him but I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to live my life like that. Eventually about 6...
Source: Addiction Recovery Blog - July 15, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Addiction Recovery Author Tags: Heroin Treatment Source Type: blogs
Guest blogger Dr. Manuel Mota-Castillo on the overdiagnosis of ADHD
We don't shy away from controversy here at Shrink Rap, and today, child psychiatrist Dr. Mota-Castillo joins us to discuss the idea that children with bipolar disorder are being misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder and then being inappropriately treated with stimulants, which may be causing them more harm than good. I've already written about my thoughts on the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder as a catch-all category, and if you'd like to revisit that, see my article on Rethinking Bipolarity in Clinical Psychiatry News. And now for our guest blogger:
* * ...
Source: Shrink Rap - June 28, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Dinah Source Type: blogs
Lundbeck Fined $125M Over Pay-To-Delay Deal In Europe
In the latest move by regulators to clamp down on so-called pay-to-delay deals, the European Commission has fined Lundbeck and four other drugmakers for reaching agreements to block entry of generic versions of the best-selling Celexa antidepressant. Lundbeck was fined $125.6 million, while the others - including Ranbaxy Laboratories - paid a total of nearly $70 million.
After the basic patent that Lundbeck held on the molecule had expired, the drugmaker only retained a number of related process patents that provided limited protection. And so, Lundbeck struck deals in 2002 with generic rivals to refrain from selling copyc...
Source: Pharmalot - June 19, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: esilverman Source Type: blogs
EU fines Lundbeck for paying off pharma rivals
The European Commission has fined Danish pharmaceutical Lundbeck €93.8 million after the EU executive ruled that it had paid rival companies to delay market entry of generic versions of anti-depressant Citalopram. Prices of Citalopram fell by 90% when cheaper generic versions of the drug became widely available.
http://euobserver.com/tickers/120551? (Source: PharmaGossip)
Source: PharmaGossip - June 19, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: insider Source Type: blogs
Lundbeck Faces 'Sizeable' Fine Over Pay-To-Delay Deals In Europe
Nearly a year after charging nine drugmakers - including Lundbeck, Merck KGgA and Ranbaxy Laboratories - with blocking the entry of generic versions of the best-selling Celexa antidepressant, the European Commission is getting ready to hand out fines, Reuters reports.
Last July, the EC charged Lundbeck and its rivals struck deals that "foresaw substantial value transfers" to the generic competitors, which subsequently did not sell lower-cost versions of the antidepressant. These value transfers included direct payments from Lundbeck to the other drugmakers, well as purchases of generic Celexa stock for destruction or guara...
Source: Pharmalot - June 3, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: esilverman Source Type: blogs
Forest CEO Solomon Finally Listens To Carl Icahn And Will Retire
Carl Icahn has been waiting a long time for this. After years of controversy over his stewardship, Howard Solomon will retire as ceo of Forest Laboratories by the end of the year, and he will relinquish his role as chairman by the time the drugmaker holds its annual meeting in 2014. Meanwhile, a committee has been appointed to choose a successor. He will, however, remain a director.
The move comes after Solomon, who is 85 and has been ceo since 1977, has had a decidedly mixed tenure. On one hand, he helped build the drugmaker into a large purveyor of medicines, but more recently, he presided over setbacks that prompted cor...
Source: Pharmalot - May 23, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: esilverman Source Type: blogs
Citalopram in the Sunday Post
Reblogged from Leonie fennell's Blog:
I never expected my life to turn out like this. Before Shane died, I was happily rambling along minding my own business (I was, I swear!). There are more and more compelling arguments that Citalopram and other SSRIs can cause people to kill themselves and others. Don't let it be you or your family. Be aware that these type of drugs are powerful mind altering drugs.
Read more… 125 more words (Source: Dawn Willis sharing the News and Views of the Mentally Wealthy)
Source: Dawn Willis sharing the News and Views of the Mentally Wealthy - May 8, 2013 Category: Mental Illness Authors: Dawn Willis Tags: Mental Health, The News & Policies. Source Type: blogs
