Pharmacology

The FDA, following the advice of their advisory panel, voted yesterday to approve Addyi, aka "Female Viagra," or "Pink Viagra." Good move? Bad? Keep reading... I've written about this before. Without trying to sound too cocky, I will state that, in my humble opinion, that the title of my first article was the best ever. Since I get paid one-twentieth of a cent per view, I'm hoping that my failure to divulge this information here might tempt 1,000 of you to clink on the link above, if only out of morbid curiosity, thus enabling me to add $0.50 to my already-vast fortune. What is most…

So, I get in a pissy mood once in a while. Before you judge, you try taking the Times Square-Grand Central Station shuttle every day. See what kind of mood you end up in: Then I read something so infuriatingly stupid in the Huffington Post — which is of questionable value even on a good day — that my already-sour disposition headed even further south. It was a recent opinion piece entitled “The Cure for Gilead” by Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Earth Institute?? I don't know on which planet the Earth Institute exists, but it ain't Earth.…

Adding the price tag to prescription medicines worth more than £20 in England is just a "headline grabbing gimmick" which could mislead patients into believing that cheaper drugs are less important, according to an editorial in Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin. On July 1st this year, health secretary for England Jeremy Hunt announced plans to print the indicative cost of medicines on all packs of those worth more than £20 alongside the phrase "funded by the UK taxpayer." The initiative aims to encourage more people to take personal responsibility for the use of finite public resources, added to…

It is hardly news when partygoers end up in the emergency room from an overdose of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), aka ecstasy (and a whole bunch of other names, such as Molly, E, X, many others). Rather than simply report on another recent case at a music festival in California, in which ecstasy may have been the cause of two deaths, we thought it might be more interesting to explain what ecstasy really is, and debunk the myths that surround it. Ecstasy gets a “clean bill of health” when compared to other recreational drugs. It is considered to be natural and safe. In reality, it is…

It has been 13 years since the publication of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) studies that examined the role of menopausal hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in prevention of cardiovascular disease. It can be argued that never before or since has a medical study generated such controversy by the media and scientific community. To this day, the results are still being debated, reinterpreted and, in many cases, misinterpreted. Estrogen was initially prescribed for vasomotor symptoms related to menopause in the 1960s; by the end of the decade the pendulum toward estrogen had swung so far it…

Most of us would choose to experience pleasure – however we may define it – as often as possible. The public health and criminal justice systems are set up by the government partly to shape how, when and where we find pleasure, so that we balance our enjoyment with working and paying taxes. But some are protesting that the government’s new blanket ban on psychoactive substances goes a step too far – and imposes on our freedom to control what goes on in our heads. The rhetoric of risk, harm and wrongdoing is used to persuade us to make “rational” choices about our consumption. One common…

The more we learn about the problem of too much medicine and what’s driving it, the harder it seems to imagine effective solutions. Winding back unnecessary tests and treatments will require a raft of reforms across medical research, education and regulation. But to enable those reforms to take root, we may need to cultivate a fundamental shift in our thinking about the limits of medicine. It’s time to free ourselves from the dangerous fantasy that medical technology can deliver us from the realities of uncertainty, aging and death. We’re all ill now A growing body of evidence shows that…

Loxo Oncology, Inc. and The University of Colorado Cancer Center today announced the publication of a research brief describing the first patient with a tropomyosin receptor kinase (TRK) fusion cancer enrolled in the Phase 1 dose escalation trial of LOXO-101, the only selective TRK inhibitor in clinical development. Additional contributors to the paper include the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health&Science University and Foundation Medicine, Inc. (Nasdaq:FMI). The peer-reviewed research brief describes a female patient with advanced soft tissue sarcoma widely metastatic to the lungs…

At the risk of missing out on a life experience, I Doubt I'll be trying this stuff anytime soon: “Very quickly, anxiety and feelings of profound ‘wrongness’ set in. …I was getting closed eye visuals of people who seemed to be covered in mold or fungi and ‘hearing’ a kind of toothless mumbling that disturbed me immensely. It sounded like the noise a severely mentally challenged person might make, and my head was full of thoughts of ordinary people subjected to ruinous torture and experimentation.”  Based on this paragraph alone, I think this guy should be a writer for Science 2.0.…

A new study by researchers at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy, Geriatric Unit&Laboratory of Gerontology and Geriatrics, IRCCS "Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza", San Giovanni Rotondo, Foggia, Italy, and Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Roma, Italy, estimates the association between change or constant habits in coffee consumption and the incidence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), evaluating 1,445 individuals recruited from 5,632 subjects, aged 65-84 year old, from the Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging (ILSA), a population-based sample from eight Italian municipalities…