The Washington Post had a major piece that discussed the ethics of efforts to use public pressure to force drug companies to make expensive drugs available to patients at affordable prices. Remarkably it never discussed the role of patent monopolies.
In the case that was the immediate focus of the article, a young boy who was suffering from cancer and seemed likely to benefit from a drug that was still in the experimental stage, it does not appear that patent protection was a major factor. However in many cases patients will face exorbitant prices for a life-saving drug that they may not be able to afford because the drug is subject to patent protection. Continue reading
About 5.8 million American adults may no longer be prescribed drugs to treat high blood pressure under recently revised guidelines, according to a new study.
The American people are the most drugged people in the history of the planet. Illegal drugs get most of the headlines, but the truth is that the number of Americans that are addicted to legal drugs is far greater than the number of Americans that are addicted to illegal drugs. As you will see below, close to 70 percent of all Americans are currently on at least one prescription drug. In addition, there are 60 million Americans that “abuse alcohol” and 22 million Americans that use illegal drugs. What that means is that almost everyone that you meet is going to be on something. That sounds absolutely crazy but it is true. 
Buried beneath the avalanche of recent news reports about the latest Obamacare-mandated funding cuts to the Medicare Advantage (MA) program is a related but far more disturbing story — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken a major step toward rationing medications to the elderly. Since passage of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, seniors enrolled in the Medicare prescription drug program have been guaranteed access to “all or substantially all” of the drugs in several classes of pharmaceuticals. President Obama’s health care bureaucrats, however, have proposed removing three of these classes from the “protected” list. 
Pop quiz: Is the proportion of American children suffering from the disease known as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder . . .
This highlights the 4.4 percent of the U.S. has bipolar disorder, as best we know. The global rate is about half that, though detection and diagnosis vary dramatically. Still, treatment for the millions of people with the at-times debilitating condition involves an impressive degree of trial and error amid arrays of pills.
The pervasive use of generic over brand-name medications was anticipated to be a money-saver, but recently prices are soaring, even up 6,000 percent for some common drugs that were once fairly low-cost.
Mince pies, pudding and brandy butter, chocolates, – Christmas truly is the season of sugar. The average British adult will consume the equivalent of 32 teaspoons of the stuff on Christmas Day alone, according to the British Heart Foundation.
The nation’s first new guidelines in a decade for preventing heart attacks and strokes call for twice as many Americans — one-third of all adults — to consider taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.
The number of people in America who died from taking prescription pain killers quadrupled between 1999 and 2010, a new report from the Trust for America’s Health says.
Doctors sounded a warning Tuesday over a rise in ADHD diagnoses, saying some children may be needlessly taking powerful drugs intended to correct a poorly understood disorder.
