“The FDA recommended an updated boxed warning and standardization of product labels across the drug class. They recommended judicious prescribing and a gradual taper to mitigate withdrawal reactions. While I am optimistic about these changes, the…
Category: Medications
The FDA was wrong about Aduhelm
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) negated the recommendation of its expert panel and approved Aduhelm to treat Alzheimer’s dementia (AD), contending that the possible benefit trumped the lack of evidence of efficacy. The FDA was inexcusably in err…
The life cycle of medication consumption
Photography A person’s lifetime medication consumption has a familiar and predictable pattern. The more a person ages, the greater their number of taken medication. However, the public behavior in initiating medication has been changed compared to thir…
These journal ads could not run today
Many drug ads in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s would offend today. In an ad for Valium, we are told that the woman pictured (“Jan”) is “psychoneurotic” because she is unmarried at age 35. “You…
Does the FDA approval of aducanumab mark the return of science-based medicine?
The 20th century was an explosion of scientific innovation and discovery. The success of chemistry, physics and biology to produce things such as antibiotics, radiography and genetic analysis could not be ignored. Medicine is not now, nor has it ever b…
4280: the number of pills Bob took last year
An installation to explore the impact of medications in daily life Bob is a typical patient at the pharmacy with a chronic illness. Bob, along with 30 other random patients whom I followed in the year 2017, had been picked up to explore the number of m…
Drug advertising has helped created victim politics
“How dare you suggest I/my son is not sick?” “Stop invalidating the lived experiences of millions of people!” “Able-bodied people like you have no right to report this.” “How dare you suggest my medication has …
How a doctor fell in love with a drug addict
“Something’s wrong with Eddie.” In four words, my entire wedding day collapsed around me. I’d just arrived at a beautiful Gothic chapel in a rented 1950 Rolls Royce, mom and dad on either side of me, prepared for a picture-perfect first look with my g…
The complications of drug regulation
When the “opioid crisis” is mentioned, most people think of heroin, prescription pills like oxycodone, or — more recently — the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Fewer people would think of novel opioids like tianeptine, although an incre…
Practicing medicine without a license is illegal. Yet cannabis dispensaries are doing it.
I look forward to clinic days. I thoroughly enjoy meeting with patients, hearing how they’re doing, and helping them to feel better – even if, on occasion, the only thing I can do to help is to listen. Yesterday was a clinic day. In the middle of…
