Monthly Archives: January 2010

The medicalization of everyday life

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
8

bad science coverDr.  Ben Goldacre, a British doctor writing in his weekly Bad Science column in The Guardian last fall, told this disturbing cautionary tale:

“In 2007, the British Medical Journal published a large, well-conducted, randomised controlled trial, performed at lots of different locations, run by publicly-funded scientists.  It delivered a strikingly positive result.  It showed that one treatment could significantly improve children’s anti-social behaviour. The treatment was entirely safe, and the study was even accompanied by a very compelling cost-effectiveness analysis.

“But did this story get reported as front page news? Was it followed up on the health pages, with an accompanying photo feature, describing one child’s miraculous recovery, and an interview with an attractive happy mother with whom we could all identify?  Continue reading →

Selling superbugs: how those disinfectants are making us sick

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
5

Take a few high-profile hospital infections or foodborne bacteria scares, a pandemic warning, our culture’s natural aversion to germs, and a relentless scare campaign – and it’s party time for disinfectant manufacturers.  It’s a big market, too: the industry journal Food Quality News issued a report last April predicting that North American sales of disinfectant hand cleansers and hard surface cleaning products will top $1.2 billion next year, mostly from key industry players like Arch Chemicals, Dow, Ecolab, Lonza, Rohm and Haas, and Troy. According to this report:

“These gains will result from increased consumer concerns fueled in large part by well-publicized lapses in proper sanitation techniques in food and beverage processing facilities.”

But consumers should stop and think before they squirt out another blob of that hand gel: using disinfectants could cause bacteria to become resistant to antibiotics as well as to the disinfectant itself, according to new research published in the January issue of the journal Microbiology. Continue reading →

Johnson & Johnson: “Welcome to your nursing home nightmare!”

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
5

When I visit my friend Ruth in her nursing home, I have to walk down a long corridor to get to her room. Along one wall of the long corridor sits a large aquarium. In front of the large aquarium, wheelchairs are lined up every day, eight or nine in a row facing the fish, their occupants slumped in semi-conscious stupor, rheumy eyes half-closed or glazed, with none of them paying any attention to the fish. It is distressing to me, this row of seniors. It reminds me that every one of them was once young and healthy.

They had families and careers and a social life.  And now here they are, lined up in front of an aquarium they do not see.

It also reminds me that this fate in front of the fish may well await me  – and you – one day, too, especially if drug companies like Eli Lilly or Johnson & Johnson have their way dispensing their anti-psychotic crowd control drugs to the frail elderly.

But these anti-psychotic drugs can raise the risk of death in dementia cases and are not approved to treat this, although that hasn’t stopped J&J from offering kickbacks in exchange for pushing its anti-psychotic, Risperdal.

According to a government news release, J&J paid kickbacks to a big nursing home pharmacy company, Omnicare, to get the company to prescribe more of its drugs, including Risperdal. And this is not the first time. Last year, Omnicare paid $98 million to settle allegations that it had solicited and received kickbacks from J&J in exchange for recommending Risperdal.  Some people just don’t get it.

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said in the news release:

“Kickbacks in the nursing home pharmacy context are particularly nefarious because they can result in excessive prescribing of strong drugs to patients who have little or no control over the medical care they are receiving. Pharmacists’ recommendations should not be a product of money that a drug company is paying to the pharmacy.”  Continue reading →

Busted! Ski resorts lure weekend skiers with false snow reports

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
3

 

Vancouver's Cypress Mountain this week

Don’t you love a good David-and-Goliath story?  Here’s one about a little bitty iPhone app that has forced mega-ski resorts to alter their public updates on snow conditions. For the sake of clarity, I’ll call this: ‘Telling The Truth For A Change”.  But first, let’s look at a very recent example of this issue at work. There’s a secret that the organizers of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games in Vancouver do not want you to know: it rains a lot here on the balmy West Coast of Canada all winter.  

In fact, World Cup ski events are no longer held here because of the frequency of warm weather cancellations.

And recent winter rains have forced Cypress Mountain to close this week.  Cypress is home to Olympic aerial and mogul skiing and to snowboarding, snow-cross and ski-cross events. 

While the people who actually live here have far more important things to worry about next month (like 2,000 elective surgeries being cancelled in Vancouver because of the Games, or the homeless being tidily swept off the streets so the world’s media will not notice them, or 800 of our province’s teachers losing their jobs because, although there is plenty of government money for the Games, there’s not enough for education), Vancouver’s Olympic organizers may also be a wee bit worried about their snow venues just weeks before the games start.  It’s really a dreadful problem compared to cancelled surgeries or the homeless issue or fired teachers.

But these organizers now insist they’ve got enough snow stockpiled to run Olympic events at Cypress when the Olympic games happen from February 12-28, 2010. Tim Gayda, the 2010 games’ vice-president of sport, explained:

“When we saw this warming trend, we worked with the mountain to look at all the places where there was natural snow and we started to stockpile it. When you push it into these big piles, it insulates it a lot better. There’s thousands of cubic metres of snow in each pile.”

So “Don’t worry, be happy” is once again the reassuring update from the slopes.  It turns out, however, that reassurances of excellent ski conditions are actually a common marketing practice in the ski industry – whether they are true or not. Good conditions lure skiers to the hill.  Poor conditions scare them off.  Ski resorts have for years pulled a subtle snow job on the recreational skier/snowboarder, routinely inflating reports of how much new snow has fallen in order to lure the lucrative weekend crowd, according to a new study called Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising reported by national correspondent David Ebner in The Globe and Mail last week.   Continue reading →