merrill goozner

See posts by Gary Schwitzer on the Schwitzer Health News Blog, and by Merrill Goozner on the GoozNews Blog on a new low in disclosing results of randomized controlled trials.

On the GoozNews blog, Merrill Goozner dissects the recent decision by the US Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make more lenient the criteria it uses to decide which off-label anti-cancer drugs it will pay for.

Now any drug rated favorably in at least one of several drug compendia will be approved.

On the GoozNews blog, Merrill Goozner posted about how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) set up a program to educate consumers about direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising.

It seems that the organization the FDA hired for this purpose is nominally a not-for-profit, but not registered as such with the federal government, and is run by the president of a pharmaceutical marketing agency.

We recently blogged about Dr Marcia Angell's commentary about how the increasing influence of those with vested interests in selling products or services has "broken" the clinical research system.

In the same issue of JAMA were two other commentaries.

The New York Times recently reported on the rush to use advanced CT scans for cardiologic diagnosis, in the absence of much evidence that this expensive technology works.

On Gooznews, Merrill Goozner posits the "lessons from Vytorin," principally, that clinical trials should not be run by pharmaceutical companies, but rather by an independent agency, a la the NIH.