As children grow up, they learn an important lesson: when you are sick, taking medicine usually helps you feel better in a reasonably short time. That acquired knowledge has helped generations of kids suck down foul-tasting cough medicine and other remedies. In fact, “taking your medicine” has become cultural shorthand for doing something that may be unpleasant in the short run, but benefits one over the long term. This is certainly aided by the fact the United States has one of the safest drug supplies in the world; when you take a medication in America, you can count on it […]
Category: Prescription Drugs
A Bitter Pill to Swallow: Many Americans Can’t Afford Their Medicine
For the first time in decades, Americans are actually spending less on their medication That’s according to a recent study by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics which found the total spending on medicines fell 3.5 percent last year –from $329.2 billion in 2011 to $325.8 billion in 2012. The study attributes much of it to an encouraging trend: the declining use of brand-name drugs and the greater availability of less expensive generics. But it’s not all good news. The study’s authors say that the decrease spending on medications was driven also by consumers cutting back on health care overall – […]
Is that Drug Really Necessary?
A recent Boston Globe article described a large settlement a family won against Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Children’s Motrin. There’s an old adage, “All I know is what I read in the newspaper” and that is the case here. While it may sound like a windfall for the family, there was more to the story than just suing for—and winning—millions of dollars, and there is no happy ending nor winner. According to the article, when a little girl was seven years old her parents gave her Children’s Motrin for a fever. She apparently received three doses over 24 […]
Gender-Specific Medicine: Part 2
This week we continue to look at gender medicine- how diseases may manifest themselves differently, and how medications may affect differently- depending on whether you are male or female. An editorial in Nature in 2010 urged us to “put Gender on the Agenda,” as increasingly we are seeing from research results that there are distinct gender-based differences in disease incidence and activity, and treatment methods, especially medication. Cancer, for example, is the second leading cause of death among women and men, (Anderson, R.N., Deaths: Leading Causes for 2000. National Vital Statistics Reports. 2002, National Center for Health Statistics: Hyattsville, MD), […]
Gender-Specific Medicine
“Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars.” “Women think differently than men.” These viewpoints appear to be widespread and popular, fueling spirited and on-going debate in the media and the arts, but what about healthcare and medicine? Most medical research over the years has focused on white men as subjects, and results were then extrapolated to include everyone else. From an ethical perspective, there were some humanistic reasons for this, e.g., protecting women and children from experimental research that may not have benefited them. In many cases, however, research focused on those in positions of power. This situation is slowly […]