Two months from now we will be in mid-winter, late January. How about four days in warm, sunny West Palm Beach, Florida? All-expenses-paid. How inviting. But how troubling. Once again. An email was sent to journalists this week announcing this junket funded by Bayer, a multinational drug company. More
An email was sent to journalists this week announcing this junket funded by Bayer, a multinational drug company. Bayer markets a number of cardiovascular drugs – and cardiovascular disease is the topic of this Florida fellowship. More
Special interests and congressional inaction doomed efforts to regulate electronic medical records, putting patients at risk. More
As deductibles and co-pays grow, insured patients owe a larger share of their medical bills. More and more are being taken to court. More
Despite the claim that "CDC does not accept commercial support," this agency does indeed have financial ties to industry organizations. A petition from watchdog groups is demanding transparency. More
Laboratory benefits managers have emerged to help insurers and others manage the expanding worl of diagnostic testing. Oversight is needed. More
In the 40 years since the world’s first “test tube baby,” fertility clinics have cooked up nearly three dozen such “add-ons,” or supplementary procedures. Like immune therapy for supposed genetic incompatibility, they’re not essential to IVF. Instead, clinics offer procedures such as “assisted hatching” and “embryo glue” and “uterine artery vasodilation” as purportedly science-based options that increase the chance of having a baby. Except there is little to no evidence that the vast majority of IVF add-ons do any such thing, conclude four papers published on Tuesday in Fertility and Sterility, the journal of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. More
In a national survey, seriously ill Medicare beneficiaries described financial hardships resulting from their illness—despite high beneficiary satisfaction with Medicare overall and the fact that many have supplemental insurance. About half reported a serious problem paying medical bills, with prescription drugs proving most onerous. More
Dignity Health said its employee, an ER nurse, failed to meet the deadline to add her premature newborn to its health plan, so she was responsible for the medical bills. It rejected her appeals for a year until ProPublica called. More
Is sunshine really the best disinfectant? Or do we need much more than transparency when it comes to financial conflicts of interest? More
Americans are rightly furious about the high and unsustainable price of cancer drugs, which now routinely cost more than $100,000 per year of therapy. Those prices are made worse by the fact that most cancer drugs offer only modest benefits — one study put the median benefit at 2.1 extra months of life — along with the fact that expert physicians frequently recommend these drugs for off-label uses, meaning using a drug for a purpose it was not initially approved for. More
With help from a network of industry-independent experts, doctors are speaking out against conflicts of interest in maternal safety recommendations More
Doctors are criticizing a recent recommendation from medical experts to give blood-thinning drugs to nearly all women who give birth by caesarean section, saying the advice may be unsafe and tainted by potential conflicts of interest. “This is basically an experiment being done on new moms,” said Adam Urato, chief of maternal fetal medicine at MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, Mass., said in an interview. More
It's a Lown Institute tradition to highlight pharma's fear-mongering on Halloween, and this year is no exception. More
Americans are losing trust in their doctors, says Dr. Marty Makary in his new book, The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care — and How to Fix It. The reason, he argues, is that medical care is just too expensive. More
Slate More
Randomized controlled trials are known as the "gold standard" in medical research--but they also have a significant down-side... More
A new series of articles in the Boston Globe touts the generosity and quality of Boston Children’s hospital. But who is funding these articles…? More
Lown Institute’s top ten list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in health care, named for Martin Shkreli, the price-hiking “pharma bro” that everyone loves to hate. More
For the past 11 years, HealthNewsReview.org has helped journalists find industry-independent experts to use as sources in their stories. It’s an effort begun by journalists Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee (now a VP at the Lown Institute), but joined by me and Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD, of Georgetown not long after. More