Sex matters as much as gender. Sex differences still have an impact on the health of our populations. Despite an increased enrolment of women and the beginnings of understanding sex differences, very little has moved to explore these issues in the last three decades. Most clinical studies still do not include sex-specific analyses. It’s enough to keep […]
Category: Pharmaceuticals
Excess prescribing of pharmaceuticals is a nightmare for both patients and prescribers. It’s much easier to add one medication after another than to take a patient off any. After all, if one is good, aren’t two or three better? And in countries that lack robust primary care, multiple specialists may prescribe multiple medications without any cross referencing. […]
Many countries are relaxing their restrictions on cannabis. It’s been a long time since a psychoactive drug based on a plant and already widely used illicitly has been regulated. That is not surprising, given the trajectories of use and abuse of three of the older regulated products – opioids, tobacco and alcohol. Can THC help? […]
Should women use reproductive hormones? There is growing evidence of higher risk, yet little research is happening to study alternatives to oral contraception or HRT (hormone replacement therapy). Why aren’t researchers and clinicians talking about the risks of continuous use of reproductive hormones by women throughout their life cycle? More than a decade ago, a […]
Drugs are here to stay but the way they should be used is changing. It started with antibiotics – too many are unnecessary. Now many drugs are prescribed for courses that are too long. No ‘one-size-fits-all’ – neither for the choice of drug nor the duration of use. More than two thirds of antibiotic courses for acute […]
Does legislation really make a difference to the health of women? A quarter of a century ago, the USA legislated in the Women’s Health Equity Act to remove the inequalities between men and women in medical research. More recently, Health Canada recommended comparative studies in healthy male and/or female volunteers to minimize variability. Nonetheless, nothing has really […]
What goes in must come out – in some form or another. Our bodies are relatively efficient processing systems, so when we have extracted what we require from pharmaceutical agents, the rest is excreted in urine and faeces and finally makes its way to our wastewater. Seventy-two percent of these pharmaceuticals end up in our […]
Do drugs really lose their potency and if they do are they really a danger to us? The recent decision by the FDA to extend the shelf life of EpiPens beyond what is on the label has challenged conventional thinking about the long-term safety of stored drugs – and it’s about time. Unfortunately, there is very […]
Pharmaceutical names are an important part of branding products. They are designed to encode a message about the product. Older names were focussed on the clinical aspects of a drug. Sometimes they alluded to the disease such as Procardia for heart problems and Tamiflu for influenza treatment. Other names related to what the drug does […]
Recycling old drugs is not new. Clinicians quite often prescribe treatments with drugs that are “off label”, that is, proven for other conditions. Up to one-fifth of all available drugs are prescribed off-label. Almost 90% of drugs that are approved for one condition have other conditions that they can treat. Fortunately, most off-label uses are […]
One in three adults use daily medicines that don’t require prescriptions. Most of these over the counter (OTC) medications are our first treatment for common problems such as pains, aches, sprains, colds and rashes. Non-prescribed use of pain killers comes in fourth in the list of most frequently used drugs: behind alcohol, tobacco and cannabis, […]
Patients know how to take holidays from their illnesses. In one study of patients on blood pressure medications, half of them stopped treatment within a year of starting and the other half had at least one drug holiday every year. Drug holidays can also extend life It seems you can miss a few doses and […]
New evidence suggests that taking a combined cocktail of preventive medications can help us live longer. In these times of soaring health expenditure this should be good news to public health. But governments seem reticent to invest in combined preparations even when they can potentially extend life, minimize morbidity and deliver cheap pharmaceuticals. The problem […]
The battle against obesity is as relentless as the fight against sugar. The difference is that the fight against sugar is one of global economics rather than public health. And that’s a problem based in the history of research. Obesity first emerged as the blockade against bad fats in our diet and quickly became confused […]
More than 30% of all medicines in many African and Asian countries are falsified, rising to 50% for antibiotics making the fake drug market more lucrative than fake handbags and fake watches. Here in the Western world Interpol and other agencies are struggling to keep online drug sales below 1%. But they’re growing, even Tory […]
A recent study found that the following terms – used by media to attract our attention especially on quiet news days – are no more than pollutants: “breakthrough”, “game changer”, “miracle”, “cure”, “home run”, “revolutionary”, “transformative”, “life saver”, “groundbreaking” and “marvel”. Researchers identified 36 drugs associated with these terms in press releases where the hyperbole […]
When venture capitalist Martin Shrekli recently bought a pharmaceutical company and repackaged and repriced, by 5000%, an old drug that HIV patients use to treat fungal infection, he set the world of pharmaceutical pricing on fire. That kind of maverick decision by Shkreil made me, for one, realize how much our wellbeing is at the […]
Living longer increases our likelihood of experiencing more than one chronic health problem at a time. At least one in two older people have more than one chronic disorder with an average number of conditions ranging between 2.5 and 6.5. That is a heavy burden for one person. Co-morbidity or multimorbidity, as it is now […]
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