philadelphia inquirer

Two weeks ago, reports of the largest legal settlement involving a pharmaceutical company to date in the US appeared. 

The $3 Billion Settlement

In summary, per the Philadelphia Inquirer,

At "The Lancet Emphasizes the Threats to the Academic Medical Mission" Roy Poses summarized the major categories of ills affecting healthcare today.

The list reads like a list of the Ten Plagues of Egypt visited upon the Pharaohs (actually thirteen categories are listed, but plagues they are indeed to patients and conscientious medical practitioners).

In December, 2009, we updated the story of Swiss-based medical device company Synthes and the marketing by its Norian division of a bone cement.  At that time, US authorities charged the company with use of an unapproved product in about 200 patients, three of whom suffered untimely deaths.  At that point, four US based Synthes executives had pleaded guilty to charges related to this affair. 

As mentioned in my previous post on the MIT controversy surrounding an economist's testifying to Congress on healthcare policy without revealing possible economic conflicts of interest that could affect his views, frequently expressed on this blog are concerns about undisclosed conflicts of interest and their corrosive effects upon healthcare (query link).

This one nearly snuck by. 

A Settlement and Some Indictments

Ghostwriting is a topic covered extensively at Healthcare Renewal, including at my post "Wyeth: Ghostwritten Papers Fake, But Accurate" here, Roy Poses' "Wyeth's Industrial Scale Ghost-Writing" here, and many others about Wyeth and other pharmas that can be viewed via this link:

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer in a story entitled "FDA: Pfizer ignored warnings, gets record fine" we learn that:

The [$2.3 billion] fine, which had been expected, was the largest ever paid by a drug company for defrauding the government's Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The U.S.

Justice Department said that it included the largest criminal fine in U.S. history - $1.2 billion.

The Philadelphia VA Hospital has had some problems with brachytherapy (implantation of small radioactive pellets for prostate cancer) recently.

Multiple procedures were bungled, including wrong placement and incorrect dosages.
In this story, there apparently is a computer involved.

From the New York Times article "At VA Hospital, a Rogue Cancer Unit", June 20, 2009:

Last month, we posted about a legal settlement in which device manufacturer Synthes agreed to stop creating conflicts of interests by paying physicians who performed its trials with company stock.

Synthes is back in the news, and not in favorable terms. As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer,

I find Merck Scientific Affairs executive Jonathan Edelman's op ed in today's Philadelphia Inquirer on the Vioxx "ADVANTAGE seeding trial" controversy to be mediocre spin control at best, if not deliberately misleading through selective omission of critical facts:

Taking Exception
Great value in clinical studies
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 26, 2008