Osteoporosis Drug Boniva
Public Citizen
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Article on Boniva
Patients Should Wait Until 2010 to Take Osteoporosis Drug Boniva, Public Citizen Reveals on WorstPills.org Web Site
“Worst Pills, Best Pills” Readers Also Receive Life-Saving Warnings About Dangerous Drugs Before They Are Removed From the Market.
WASHINGTON - October 2 - Patients should wait until 2010 to take Boniva (ibandronate) because it is a relatively new osteoporosis drug, and no evidence exists to prove Boniva is any more therapeutic than older drugs, Public Citizen writes in a new October posting on its WorstPills.org Web site. The consumer advocacy organization cited information published in the August 14 issue of The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics.
Since Boniva has been on the market for only three years, it is impossible to know whether there are any previously unknown, potentially harmful adverse effects. Public Citizen recommends waiting seven years before taking a newly approved drug, unless it is a breakthrough drug, which is a drug that offers documented advantages in healing over older, proven drugs. Many new drugs have been taken off the market during the first seven years they were available, because they have proven dangerous to patients. By relying on older, safer drugs, patients can minimize risk.
Boniva is available in oral and injected form. The tablet is taken once a month, while the injected form of the drug is given once every three months. Though the injection received the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval in January 2006, currently there are no studies available that show the effectiveness of injected ibandronate in reducing bone fractures in women. In fact, the FDA’s approval was meted out on the basis that injected Boniva was “not inferior” to the drug’s oral form.
“New drugs are tested only in small numbers of people prior to FDA approval, and serious adverse effects or drug interactions often show up only after thousands of people take the drug,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group. “Patients should make sure a drug is as risk-free as possible before they take it.”
The October updates to the WorstPills.org Web site also give consumers information about why consumers should not use Internet-sold dietary supplements for erectile dysfunction, how migraine drugs and antidepressants may cause life-threatening interactions as well as how birth defects can be caused by antidepressants alone. These latter articles contain the caveat: Do not stop any antidepressant medication without first consulting your physician.
Worst Pills, Best Pillsis a monthly newsletter available in print and electronic formats through Public Citizen’s Web site, www.WorstPills.org. The article about ibandronate will be available free on the site for the next seven days. The site has other searchable information about the uses, risks and adverse effects associated with prescription medications, including all the information contained in Public Citizen’s best-selling book, Worst Pills, Best Pills.
Worst Pills is an unbiased analysis of information from a variety of sources, including well-regarded medical journals and unpublished data obtained from the FDA that allow Public Citizen to sound the alarm about potentially dangerous drugs long before they are banned by the federal government. For example, Public Citizen warned consumers about the dangers of Vioxx, ephedra, Baycol and Propulsid years before they were pulled from the market.
HealthDay
Science Points to a 'Sixth Sense'
Brain study suggests people subconsciously sense trouble ahead By Ed Edelson HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, Feb. 17 (HealthDay News) -- Ever get a gut feeling something just isn't quite right, and make a decision accordingly? Science is beginning to suggest those instincts may have roots deep in the brain.
Research in young volunteers points to some kind of "sixth sense" -- a mechanism in the brain that picks up on subtle clues, then sends out subconscious signals of trouble ahead.
The finding could help explain certain intuitive phenomena seen among humans. For example, in the recent Asian tsunami, aboriginal people sought out higher ground in the moments before the disaster, as did many wild animals. Could subtle changes in weather or the environment have warned them early on?
Just such an early warning system may exist in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area important in processing complex information, according to a report by psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis. Their findings appear in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science.
British Medical Journal Article, July/04
Scandals have eroded US public's confidence in drug industry -- Lenzer 329 (7460): 247 -- BMJ
Scandals have eroded US public's confidence in drug industry
"...Guidelines for lowering cholesterol concentrations, issued on 12 July by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the American Heart Association, sparked a furore when it was shown that all but one of the nine authors had financial ties to the manufacturers of cholesterol lowering drugs. The institute subsequently posted on its website the financial interests of all those involved.
.... Dr Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the failure to disclose the eight authors' competing interests in the press release and the published paper was "a travesty." He added: "I don't question the science, but this makes a mockery of disclosure rules."
The scandal comes after the publication of a study from the centre showing that the authors of 13 of 163 articles published in leading US medical journals had failed to disclose "relevant conflicts of interest."
...One of the authors of a study on the sources of lead in children living near a smelter failed to acknowledge that her husband owned the smelter in question.
July 2004 Advocacy News
American Psychiatric Association says Bush Administration "Appreciative" of APA Efforts to Suppress Mass Media Coverage of Facts and Stories Raised by the British Medical Journal Series.
Freedom Commission Roadmap Awaited
"The release of the first iteration of the roadmap to operationalize the findings of the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health is imminent. (On screening all Americans for mental illness) "We will disseminate the document when it is unveiled...
(Direct quote from APA website)
"The BMJ story (About the screening and the drug scandals) has gained some traction in derivative reports on the Internet, though mainstream media have not touched the story, in part thanks to APA's work, for which the administration is appreciative."
(OLDER NEWS ARTICLES)
'We can implant entirely false memories'
Thursday December 4, 2003
The Guardian
Elizabeth Loftus, a UCI psychologist who has been obsessed with the subject of memory and its unreliability ... recently, she has come to believe that lab studies may underestimate people's suggestibility..."We can easily distort memories for the details of an event that you did experience," says Loftus. "And we can also go so far as to plant entirely false memories - we call them rich false memories because they are so detailed and so big."
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