I n global-health politics, cardiovascular disease is the elephant in the room—a massive problem that few want to acknowledge and even fewer want to tackle. In [a recent issue of] Lancet, Carlene Lawes and colleagues, on behalf of the International Society of Hypertension, estimate that bloodpressure-related diseases cause about half this burden, killing around 8 million people each year.1 Low-...

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Highlights Q The Good: Sweeping reform plan does not pass because it is too costly to be financed without huge taxes. But, healthcare disinflation continues; drug companies keep their pricing increases to CPI or CPI + 1%. Health supply/device stocks unit growth flattens, but best companies still achieve 12-15% growth. Firms withdraw from marginal businesses, trim sales forces/product lines and ...

Dr. Salk's professional life was as far removed from that oftoday's researchers at the National Institutes ofHealth as the sun is from, say, Wall Street. Theoretically, the NIH belongs to the American people. U.S. taxpayers give it $28 billion a year to develop remedies for human misery. Many assume that today's NIH researchers are carrying on the mission as Salk did, free from financial or com...

The Occasional Papers series is intended to provide a forum for examining a wide range of topics of interest to the hemophilia community. The World Federation of Hemophilia does not engage in the practice of medicine and under no circumstances recommends particular treatment for specific individuals. Dose schedules and other treatment regimes are continually revised and new side effects recogni...

K en johnson of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and Myrl Weinberg of the National Health Council take issue with findings from our survey of drug company–sponsored patient assistance programs (PAPs).1 Our disagreement is partly the result of a healthy debate on how best to structure our health care system. More problematic are the commentaries’ mischaracterizations ...

As recent advances have been made in developing tools to fight tuberculosis (TB), there is also a trend towards increasing advocacy by the civil society for TB research and access. One recent successful effort to increase access to treatment options for TB involved a collaborative effort to identify the need for and barriers to the use of rifapentine (RPT) use in the United States. Survey respo...

Very little real therapeutic progress was made in 2015, while a large number of unsafe or poorly evaluated drugs were authorised. The exorbitant prices for some drugs endanger universal healthcare, sometimes obliging health professionals to choose riskier options for their patients. Health professionals, health authorities and drug companies are jointly responsible for guaranteeing access to qu...

Bryant Pharmaceutical's flagship product, a popular arthritis medicine called Seflex, is selling well--but not well enough. With generic versions due on the shelves in a couple of years, the drug company is looking for a dramatic sales increase. No wonder marketing VP Laura Goldenberg feels the pressure. She knows she has to reach more consumers, but in an environment where people bombarded wit...

THIS is a sociological and not a medical book. It would be well to define and describe "The Problem of Medical Knowledge" before discussing whether social forces have effects on its formation. Certainly religion, morals, ethics and the law have their effect on the practice of medicine but that is not the subject of this book. Here the difficulties of medical knowledge are not perceived nor desc...