As you may have heard me say before, not all doctors are saints. Patients often tend to revere doctors — of which I heartily approve! But as with any group there are always bad apples. And if not all of the apples are bad, there are also incompetent ones. Sometimes they are well-meaning. Sometimes they are just hoping nobody catches on so they don’t lose their livelihood. But I am definitely NOT anti doctor, anti medicine, anti prescriptions or anti anything else. I know there is good and bad everywhere. Unfortunately, in medicine, the bad or the incompetent can mean the death or suffering of innocent people.
Filed under Doctors, medicine, News by on Aug 17th, 2017. Comment. 
I remember my respected psychopharmacology preceptor always had a pile of a bit out of date copies of the Wall Street Journal sitting around the house. I asked him why — about the third time I saw them sitting around his living room. He explained to me then it was the thing you really had to read to know what was going on in the pharmaceutical industry.
I remember I rolled my eyes heaven ward. I was too busy memorizing molecular structures and trying to understand potential mechanisms of drug-drug interactions. I still do a bunch of that sort of thing. I do it more quickly than I did at that time, but I still do it. Oh, I will find on line pretty much anything I can in “Newsfeeds” and such, but it is more to condemn than to follow these days, from what I know and can see. Basically, my problem is that they seem to keep making better sounding drugs. But from what I read, I don’t usually see them as a clear CLINICAL improvement over what I have seen in the past. In other words, I don’t think they are making people “more better” in terms of having more efficacy or less side effects or such. I just can’t find it in statistics in general, and sometimes even wonder if statistics are not a tad “Gerrymandered.”
Filed under FDA, News, prescription drugs by on Aug 25th, 2017. Comment.