terrasig
Posts by this author
April 12, 2007
Over the last year or so, the US FDA has grown tougher on withdrawing prescription and over-the-counter drugs that have not met the modern burden of proof for safety and efficacy that was officially required by the 1962 passage of the Kefauver-Harris amendments to the 1906 Federal Food and Drug Act…
April 11, 2007
The weekly NCI Cancer Bulletin recently featured a clinical trial being led by MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston where the supplement, alpha-lipoic acid, is being investigated to minimize the peripheral neuropathy associated with platinum-based chemotherapy such as cisplatin or oxaliplatin.…
April 11, 2007
As alerted by other ScienceBloggers, I have recently learned that the US Fish & Wildlife Service is proposing to the White House that Florida's manatee be removed from the "endangered" list, downgrading the marine mammal to merely "threatened." The result would be a relaxation of boating…
April 8, 2007
The relatively recent addition to ScienceBlogs, first-year medical resident, Signout, very generously tagged me with recognition as a "Thinking Blogger" on her list of "Five Blogs that Make Me Think." This meme was started in early February by Ilker Yoldas for peers to recognize content-rich blogs…
April 7, 2007
From a news release by the University of California at Davis:
The new study, published in this month's issue of Environmental Health Perspectives - available online at www.ehponline.org - was prompted by the case of a 54-year-old woman who was seen at the UCD Occupational Medicine Clinic following…
April 6, 2007
...my attention was raised to another mitochondrial glycolysis inhibitor being touted for anticancer utility. From a 1 April New York Times Op-Ed by Ralph W. Moss entitled, "Patents Over Patients":
In 2004, Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that an off-the-shelf compound called 3-bromopyruvate…
April 4, 2007
I noted a couple of days ago the voluntary withdrawal of a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease called pergolide (Permax). The reason for the withdrawal is that the drug has been linked to reports of valvular heart disease (VHD) and I promised further explanation. The story is a continuing…
April 2, 2007
A bad day for pharma on the newswires:
Pfizer subsidiaries agree to pay $34.7 million in fines
Two subsidiaries of Pfizer Inc. have agreed to pay fines totaling $34.7 million for offering a kickback to recommend company drugs and for illegally promoting the human growth hormone product Genotropin…
April 1, 2007
Doug Farrago, MD, is a private practice doc in Maine who has been publishing the print medical satire journal, Placebo Journal, since 2001. Doug does it all, including spoofing drug company adverts, collecting humorous doc stories, and generally poking fun at drug reps, HMOs, and lawyers.
About…
March 31, 2007
Leave it to the British to suggest bringing civility to blogging, specifically in blog comment threads, with a call for a suggested code of conduct. This follows blogger Kathy Sierra receiving vulgar and graphic death threats on her and others' blogs. (Kathy writes the techie blog, Creating…
March 30, 2007
No real wine column this week, although you may care (or not) that I am enjoying a glass of 2003 Thorpe McLaren Vale Shiraz Reserve while writing. Australian winemaker Linda Domas is highly favored at my local wine wholesaler and this intense but nicely balanced Shiraz is made even more lucscious…
March 30, 2007
You may have read that pergolide (Permax), a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease, has been withdrawn voluntarily from the US market due to its causal association with heart valve abnormalities. I hope to have time later to discuss why these heart problems occur and why other Parkinson's drugs…
March 27, 2007
A few years ago, GlaxoSmithKline marketed Remifemin brand of black cohosh extract from their consumer products division as a hormone-free alternative in managing menopausal symptoms. But after reports surfaced that black cohosh might be associated with cases of liver damage, GSK very quietly…
March 25, 2007
I noted just last week the latest review by Drs Newman and Cragg citing that nature remains the source of 70% of prescription drugs. Wall Street Journal medical reporter Ron Winslow took his turn yesterday contributing to the paper's new HealthBlog from New Orleans, site of the American College of…
March 24, 2007
Docs have a million of these kinds of stories, but pediatrician Dr Clark Bartram at Unintelligent Design put up a particularly moving reflection on a recent case.
March 23, 2007
For your Saturday morning reading pleasure, here are two articles following up on my dichloroacetate (DCA) and bogus internet pharmacy death posts this week. Each was recommended by my clandestine operative from the Great White North, PharmCanuck:
Canadian cancer society warns of untested drug…
March 23, 2007
I must extend hearty apologies to my colleague, wine and research mentor, and guest blogger Erleichda for overlooking a great wine column he wrote for Terra Sig back in November. November! How could I overlook a post whose third paragraph begins, "The evening began with three different champagnes…
March 22, 2007
By now you've heard about the recent death of Larry (Bud) Melman, the old Late Night With David Letterman character whose real name was Calvert DeForest (NYT obituary).
In an intellectual property dispute, NBC claimed ownership of the Larry (Bud) Melman name, even though it had been devised by a "…
March 22, 2007
It's been just over a month since we last discussed cases of misfilled internet prescriptions and misbehavior by a US drug wholesaling firm. Yesterday, Sandra Kiume at OmniBrain told us about the death of a woman in British Columbia from what sounds like another case of terribly misrepresented…
March 20, 2007
So say the American elder statesmen of natural products in the 2007 update of their periodic review of the subject to be published in the 23 March issue of the Journal of Natural Products. (Details are in this Reuters article with by Julie Steenhuysen). I will post more about the article when I…
March 19, 2007
My blog buddy Orac at Respectful Insolence has a superb post today following up on his continuous coverage of dichloroacetate and two posts I had recently on local coverage in the Edmonton Journal of this unapproved, experimental compound. As an oncologic surgeon, he provides an authoritative…
March 17, 2007
From the same reporter at the Edmonton Journal who brought us yesterday's DCA article comes news of a highly-experienced Canadian pharmacist who has been providing patients with physician-prescribed dichloroacetate. Jodie Sinnema reports that a local pharmacist has been selling DCA to patients but…
March 16, 2007
I hope Orac won't mind but with him in a surgical conference in DC right now, he may not have seen Matt the Heathen post in the comment thread at Respectful Insolence about a superb article that appeared in today's Edmonton Journal, "Possibly fatal at $2 a pop," by Jodie Sinnema.
Jodie's…
March 16, 2007
This week has seen the launch of a new health blog by the Wall Street Journal. While I don't hold the highly conservative views of the WSJ editorial pages, I have found the paper one of the best international sources of information on health trends in both conventional and alternative medicine.…
March 14, 2007
The new issue of Newsweek (19 Mar 2007) carried a surprise for me: former Wall Street Journal health reporter, Sharon Begley, has moved back to the magazine. In fact, Begley wrote this week's excellent discussion and cover story on the massive amount of science in support of evolution.
"The debate…
March 13, 2007
As cited by news services and the original source yesterday,
In a survey of 97 new patients being seen at an infertility clinic, reported in the Australia & New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology [April 2007 issue], Stankiewicz and colleagues discovered that two-thirds reported using…
March 12, 2007
As I may not be able to get an original post up today, I wish to direct readers to an interesting post by Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily. Dave does a very nice job of explaining how the purported energy savings of the DST change may not actually help, or worse, cost us energy in the end.
March 9, 2007
Since many homers read Terra Sig instead of my local interest blog, here's news on today's inaugural activities at our new community space, Bull City Headquarters (BCHQ).
March 9, 2007
On this day in 1957,
A magnitude 9.1 earthquake shook the Andreanof Islands in Alaska, the second strongest quake in U.S. history (although Alaska would not become the 49th state until more than a year later), generating a tsunami that hit the Hawaiian island of Oahu.
Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat…
March 8, 2007
We've spoken here before about the premature extrapolation of in vitro data on curcumin to the misleading human use of the spice-derivative for a whole host of cancers. Unfortunately, curcumin is not absorbed into the bloodstream at concentrations necessary for anticancer effects, even when…