The Drug Reps, again

Every once in a while this blog bangs on the drums and insists that if, as a patient, you are receiving bad information, then you are not giving informed consent to the treatment you receive. What if the continuing education your doctor receives is strongly biased towards an unproven or even dangerous medication? Here's the article.
Here's a teaser:

• Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is spending $12.3 million on an online UW course for doctors to tell them how to get their patients to quit smoking. A top priority is prescribing Pfizer's drug, Chantix, which has been linked to serious side effects, including a rash of suicides. But mention of the side effects can't be found in course materials.

•  The German company Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals paid more than $320,000 to fund a UW course on a condition known as restless legs syndrome. The course said 10% of adults have the disorder, when other research suggests the actual figure is much lower.

•  Two companies, Pfizer and Bayer, have spent more than $340,000 to fund a UW continuing education course for doctors that touts their drugs, among others, to treat an extreme form of PMS. Doctors taking the course online aren't told that some of these drugs may not work much better than a placebo.

Late Posting Monday

No posts til later in the morning; check back then.

Poetry Friday

I was going to write a longer post on Du Fu and the China of the Tang Dynasty, but, alas I could not get the mojo going. I am off to school. We will leave that to another day, and instead post a poem and some great links.

Here is one of his most famous, Ballad of the Ancient Cypress, a poem recited by then poet laureate Robert Pinsky on the occasion of President Clinton's visit to China:

Before Kongming's shrine stands an ancient cypress,
Its branches are like green bronze, its roots just like stone.
The frosted bark, slippery with rain, is forty spans around,
Its blackness blends into the sky two thousand feet above.
Master and servant have each already reached their time's end,
The tree, however, still remains, receiving men's devotion.
Clouds come and bring the air of Wuxia gorge's vastness,
The moon comes out, along with the cold of snowy mountain whiteness.

I think back to the winding road, east of Brocade Pavilion,
Where the military master and his lord of old share a hidden temple.
Towering that trunk, those branches, on the ancient plain,
Hidden paintings, red and black, doors and windows empty.
Spreading wide, coiling down, though it holds the earth,
In the dim and distant heights are many violent winds.
That which gives it its support must be heaven's strength,
The reason for its uprightness, the creator's skill.

If a great hall should teeter, wanting rafters and beams,
Ten thousand oxen would turn their heads towards its mountain's weight.
Its potential unrevealed, the world's already amazed,
Nothing would stop it being felled, but what man could handle it?
Its bitter heart cannot avoid the entry of the ants,
Its fragrant leaves have always given shelter to the phoenix.
Ambitious scholars, reclusive hermits- neither needs to sigh;
Always it's the greatest timber that's hardest to put to use.

Here is a link to the poem in Chinese, in transliteration, and in another English translation.
Here is another poem.
And here is an interesting essay on some nuts and bolts of Chinese poetry.

Enjoy!

Is this really a surprise?

For years we've known that alcohol is neuro-toxic. Now a big, systematic review of the research literature suggests that pot smoking is not nearly as dangerous to brain development as drinking. Whatever one thinks of marijuana, the physical evidence of the dangers of youth drinking is clear: significant structural and cognitive effects are noted in subjects who consume as little as 20 drinks per month, "especially if 4-5 drinks are consumed on a single occasion", for a period of 1 to 2 years.

A kid who has 4-5 drinks on most Saturday nights is damaging his brain in perhaps lasting ways.