A billion-dollar system in which charitable giving is profitable.
In August 2015, Turing Pharmaceuticals and its then-chief executive, Martin Shkreli, purchased a drug called Daraprim and immediately raised its price more than 5,000 percent. Within days, Turing contacted Patient Services Inc., or PSI, a charity that helps people meet the insurance copayments on costly drugs. Turing wanted PSI to create a fund for patients with toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that is most often treated with Daraprim.
Having just made Daraprim much more costly, Turing was now offering to make it more affordable. Continue reading
Johnson & Johnson is being sued by more than 1,000 women who developed ovarian cancer after using the company’s Baby Powder product. The lawsuit is based on the assertion that the company knew their product was associated with an increased cancer risk but deliberately withheld that information from the public. 
Major pharmaceutical companies have been feeling intense political heat in the past year over skyrocketing drug prices, with some lawmakers and politicians threatening congressional or administrative action to rein in those costs. 
The study of 115 specialty drugs found that a year’s worth of prescriptions for a single drug retailed at $53,384 per year, on average, in 2013 — more than the median U.S. household income, double the median income of Medicare beneficiaries, and more than three times as much as the average Social Security benefit in the same year. The report was prepared by the AARP Public Policy Institute to highlight the impact of drug prices on seniors. 
By now, you probably have come to realize that something is not quite right with the current health care system that dominates today. It has become a dictating, disease managing, and complicated mess that has generally left more people sick than healthy. Sure, it’s great for emergency and acute care, but when it comes to eradicating disease, it hasn’t even sniffed the coffee yet.
It leaves people bed-bound and drives some to suicide, but there’s little research money devoted to the disease. Now, change is coming, thanks to the patients themselves. 
Today, I am grateful to have a better understanding of the relationship between cholesterol and health. How about you? Are you afraid of having high cholesterol? Are you throwing away egg yolks because you think they’re bad for your health? Are you taking cholesterol-lowering medication or considering starting on one? 
A gang of 14 state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, has threatened to file a class action lawsuit against the dietary supplement industry for supposedly selling herbal products that don’t contain the listed ingredients.
A pharmaceutical drug developed by the United States Army as a supposed treatment and preventive agent for malaria is instead proving to be an ineffective, deadly, psychotropic poison. The drug, known as mefloquine (or Lariam under its brand name), is reportedly causing British soldiers to develop severe depression and mental illness, and some political leaders are now calling for its removal from the official military drugging schedule. 
Independent researchers couldn’t reproduce the findings of more than half of 100 experiments previously published in three prominent psychology journals, a new review reports.