Letting go again
My patients and readers of my blog know that one of my favorite themes is how little we doctors really know, but we love making stuff up. Much of the stuff we make up is in the category of urban...
View ArticleNew toys and what the girls and boys of medicine do with them (Part I)
In the field of medicine it's like Christmas all year-long. What I mean is there is always a shiny new drug, new stent or even a new procedure, like TAVR, to play with. Let me digress for a moment....
View ArticleNew Toys and what the Boys and Girls of Medicine do with them (Part II)
In these blog posts, I am discussing the utilization of drugs after the drugs are approved. One factoid that you must understand is this: the FDA approves drugs based on a series of studies regarding...
View ArticleNew toys and what the boys and girls of medicine do with them (Part III)
In keeping with my last several blogs regarding the use of the new antithrombins, an article was published in September in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes. As an aside, one of the...
View ArticleI thought China was bad
This blog post is about the declining environment in which we are obviously living. There is now a nationwide outbreak of fungal infections caused by a pharmacy that was compounding the steroid used to...
View ArticleFrom bad to worse (Part I)
I have blogged recently about the disaster of contaminated drugs and about Pradaxa; both topics remain in the news. First, the contaminated drugs: this event is nothing short of a disaster. The company...
View ArticleFrom Bad to Worse (Part II)
Pradaxa is once again in the news. Two very different stories about the drug were published on November 2, 2012. The first was published in the New York Times, written by Katie Thomas and is entitled...
View ArticleFrom bad to worse (Part III)
So we have a conundrum. Which is better: utilizing a new drug that works all the time and is easy to use but has a major drawback or an old drug that does not have the drawback but is impossible to...
View ArticleA stake through the heart (Part I)
There appears to be no bottom to it. I have attempted to inform you, my readers, about a problem that no one has an answer to and very few people seem to care about. It's almost as if the phrase...
View ArticleA stake through the heart (Part II): The rise of Gdufa
Who or what is Gdufa?Is Gdufa the answer to the problem of generic drug manufacturing and the lack of transparency and accountability in the entire process? Can we return to a time of naivety when we...
View ArticleAspirin...again
I have blogged about aspirin many times dating back to September 19, 2009. Yes I have been doing this for a long time. What is old is new again in an article published in Circulation online last...
View ArticleThrow your niacin away (Part I)
I have blogged about the uselessness of niacin in the past in a long blog piece about the AIM-HIGH study that began on May 31,2011 and ended on June 7, 2011. The point of those blogs were that niacin,...
View ArticleThrow away your niacin (Part II)
This part of the story surprises even me. The HPS-2 THRIVE study was stopped by Merck this past week. This was a huge study run by Oxford University in England. It utilized 14,741 patients from the...
View ArticleThis years last word on the use of the new anticoagulants
On July 27th I blogged about the 3rd musketeer apixaban, or as it will be known, Eliquis. This is the last of the new oral anticoagulants to be approved (full disclosure: the Holy Cross Jim Moran...
View ArticleClik here to view.
