Bad news: if you were still hoping to get one of the $400 juicers from Juicero, you may be out of luck. Juicero announced that they were suspending sales while they seek an acquirer. They'd already dropped the juicer's price from its initial $700 earlier this year and had hoped to find ways to drop it further, but ran out of time. I keep thinking: if they'd been a health care company, they not only might still be in business but also would probably be looking to raise their prices. Juicero once was the darling of investors. It raised $120 million from a variety of respected funding sources, including Kleiner Perkins, Alphabet and Campbell Soup. They weren't a juice company, or even an appliance company. They were a technology company! They had an Internet-of-Things product! They had an ongoing base of customers...
prescription drugs
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Amazon Is Trying to Control the Underlying Infrastructure of Our Economy
We often talk about Amazon as though it were a retailer. It's an understandable mistake. After all, Amazon sells more clothing, electronics, toys, and books than any other company. Last year, Amazon captured nearly $1 of every $2 Americans spent online. As recently as 2015, most people looking to buy something online started at a search engine. Today, a majority go straight to Amazon. But to describe Amazon as a retailer is to misunderstand what the company actually is, and to miss the depth of the threat that it poses to our liberty and the very idea of an open, competitive market...
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Doctors Given Meals by Drug Makers Prescribed More of Their Pills
Doctors who were fed meals costing even less than $20 later prescribed certain brand-name pills more often than rival medicines, according to a new analysis published on Monday of a federal database. And in most cases, costlier meals were associated with still higher prescribing rates for Medicare Part D drugs made by the same companies that provided the food. The findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, are likely to intensify an ongoing debate over the extent to which ties between drug makers and doctors unduly influence medical practice and the nation’s health care costs...
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Doctors Promoting Treatments on Social Media Routinely Fail to Disclose Ties to Drug Makers
Physicians across the United States routinely offer medical advice on social media — but often fail to mention that they have accepted tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the companies that make the prescription drugs they tout. A STAT examination of hundreds of social media accounts shows that health care professionals virtually never note their conflicts of interest, some of them significant, when promoting drugs or medical devices on sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The practice cuts across all specialties...
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Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have
One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and two slightly cute, slightly creepy fuzzy animals in the shape of the words “sleep” and “wake”...
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Free Drug Samples Prompt Skin Doctors To Prescribe Costlier Meds
Dermatologists who accept free tubes and bottles of brand-name drugs are likelier to prescribe expensive medications for acne than doctors who are prohibited from taking samples, a study reports Wednesday. The difference isn't chump change.
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Health Care's Juicero Problem
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Medicines That Kill: Separates Facts From Hype On The Dangers Of Medications
Medicines are a leading cause of death in North America, but we rarely hear about the deadly dangers both prescription and over-the-counter medications can cause. Cardiologist Dr. James L. Marcum wants to change all that with his new book Medicines That Kill: The Truth about the Hidden Epidemic (Tyndale House Publishers)...ln Medicines That Kill, Dr. Marcum shares stories of medications gone wrong and explains the dangers of using drugs without understanding how they might affect your body...
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Popular Heartburn Drugs May Cause Serious Kidney Damage
Extended use of drugs to treat heartburn, ulcers and acid reflux may lead to serious kidney damage, including kidney failure, according to a study by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System. More than 15 million Americans have prescriptions for so-called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), which decrease gastric acid production and generally have been considered safe...
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Reducing Medical Errors with Improved Communication, EHR Use
EHR use can help prevent medical errors only when lines of communication are open and reliable. The revelation that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States sent unsettling reverberations through the healthcare industry last week, but the news is likely only the tip of the iceberg and much more must be done to address this growing health issue...
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Rise of Drones for Medical Supply Delivery
This is not going to all be about getting your books, or your socks, or even your new HD television faster. It is going to impact many industries -- including health care. And that impact has already started to happen. Zipline International, for example, is already delivering medical supplies by drone in Rwanda. They deliver directly to isolated clinics despite any intervening "challenging terrain and gaps in infrastructure." They plan to limit themselves to medical supplies, but not only in developing countries; they see rural areas in the U.S. as potential opportunities as well. Last fall they raised $25 million in Series B funding. Drones are also being considered for medical supply delivery in Guyana, Haiti, and the Philippines...
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Serious Risks and Few New Benefits from FDA-Approved Drugs
Over the past year, the U.S. Senate and The New York Times have been investigating the failure of the nation’s auto safety regulators to protect citizens from cars with occasionally dangerous faulty devices. But neither august institution has paid attention to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) failure to protect the 170 million Americans who take prescription drugs from adverse reactions that are killing more than 2,400 people every week. Annually, prescription drugs cause over 81 million adverse reactions and result in 2.7 million hospitalizations...
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Single Payer Is Needed Cure
After spending 25 years in the health care field, most of it related to making hospitals more efficient and effective, I have become skeptical of many of Washington’s reform efforts, especially by my party, the GOP. Read More »
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Strengthening Protection of Patient Medical Data
Americans seeking medical care expect a certain level of privacy. Indeed, the need for patient privacy is a principle dating back to antiquity, and is codified in U.S. law, most notably the Privacy Rule of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which establishes standards that work toward protecting patient health information. But the world of information is rapidly changing, and in this environment, U.S. rules fall precariously short in protecting our medical data...
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Top Medicare Prescribers Rake In Speaking Fees From Drugmakers
When the blood pressure drug Bystolic hit the market in 2008, it faced a crowded field of cheap generics. So its maker, Forest Laboratories, launched a promotional assault [...]. It flooded the offices of health professionals with drug reps, and it hired doctors to persuade their peers to choose Bystolic — even though the drug hadn't proved more effective than competitors. Read More »
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Waste from Pharmaceutical Plants in India and China Promotes Antibiotic-Resistant Superbugs
Superbugs, disease-causing microbes that have mutated to become resistant to antibiotics, are a threat to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people today and many millions tomorrow. These organisms turn curable illnesses such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and pneumococcal pneumonia into deadly ones. This looming public health disaster has many causes. Overuse of antibiotics by humans and the routine use of antibiotics to help farm animals grow faster are key causes in the United States. One worrisome cause that has received virtually no attention until now is wastewater from drug manufacturing facilities in India and China, where a large portion of the world’s antibiotic supply is produced...
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