Category Archives: True confessions

What doctors should do – but don’t – when their colleagues are “significantly impaired or incompetent to practice medicine”

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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 There’s an old nurses’ joke that goes like this:

  • Q:   What do you call the medical student who finishes dead last in every one of his classes all through med school?
  • A:    “Doctor”

But what happens when these docs are eventually let loose upon the unsuspecting public as professionals with the letters MD after their names?  Who keeps an eye on substandard doctors?

The alarming results of a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month reveal that, although most physicians believe that their medical colleagues who are “significantly impaired or incompetent to practice medicine” should be reported, the reality is that a disturbing number actually chose instead to sit by and do nothing even when they admitted they had “direct personal knowledge” of such incompetence.  Continue reading →

50 surprising products you use every day that are made from petroleum

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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You there. Sitting at your laptop in those Lululemon yoga pants and plastic flipflops, wearing your Viva Red lip gloss and sucking on that breath mint.  Did you know that all of those items contain petroleum? Petroleum, in fact, pervades almost every aspect of our lives.

The always-enlightening Meaghan O’Neill writes:

“It’s what we use to power our cars and make machinery go, of course, but it’s also surprisingly omnipresent in thousands of products we use every day. And for women in particular, petroleum and petroleum-derived byproducts are hiding in some pretty sneaky places.”

Although she considers herself pretty “green” (she’s the author of Ready, Set, Green: Eight Weeks to Modern Living) and a highly conscious consumer, O’Neill easily came up with dozens of common household items that are made from petroleum or petroleum byproducts.  Continue reading →

Harvard cozies up with Big Pharma

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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It was like something out of the movie Michael Clayton – only with Big Pharma as the villain: a Pfizer drug rep sporting a severe black suit and taking cell phone pictures of students protesting Harvard Medical School’s ties to the drug industry. Staged last October, the Boston gathering was sparsely attended, with a few students holding signs and a petition delivered to an empty office (the dean was out of town).

But the photographer’s appearance was notable enough to merit a story in the New York Times, which eventually led to a U.S. Senate committee investigation.

And so it goes for Harvard Medical School, according to a report in Boston Magazine that reveals Harvard has actually been under increasingly intense scrutiny since 2008, when a series of incidents put a spotlight on the venerable university’s symbiotic -  if awkward –  relationship with drug companies.

The trouble started that summer, after Dr. Joseph Biederman, a child psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor, was found to have taken more than $1.6 million in payments (which he apparently failed to fully disclose to the school as required) from the maker of a major anti-psychotic drug he’d been prescribing.  Continue reading →

Lessons from Toyota for the Pope

Posted on by Carolyn Thomas
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As a recovering catholic myself, I thought Michael Valpy’s column in The Globe and Mail this month should be required reading for the old guy in Rome who is running the world’s most out-of-touch religion. For his illuminating piece on ‘The Troubled Church: Catholics At Crossroads’, Valpy interviewed Gene Grabowski, a leading U.S. expert on consumer product recalls, in a  feature called Sex Abuse: Defences Unacceptable, Solutions Elusive.

This seemingly unlikely linkage – product recall plus catholicism - makes sense. Grabowski is a superstar in the world of public relations (he was named PR Week’s 2007 ‘Crisis Manager of the Year’ for his work on U.S. national recalls of pet food, spinach and 45,000 Chinese toy imports).

And issues management and crisis communication are part of an increasingly important focus in the field of public relations – whether you are in the business of marketing cars or marketing something called faith.  Continue reading →