What do you think pharmaceutical companies spend most of their money on? R&D: the search for new drugs? Think again.



True, pharma companies spend a great deal on R&D; studies show it comprises about 14% of their revenues. Yet, they spend about 1/3 of their revenues on Marketing. That’s right, on average, pharmaceutical companies spend two to three times as much on the Marketing of a drug as on its development. (…)



By far the largest chunk of these marketing expenses are taken up by the practice of “detailing”; that is, a vast army of company representatives visit physicians to shower them with information, free samples, and persuasive arguments (and a “healthy dose” of free gifts and travel), claiming that the company’s drug is wonderful and really does what it says on the tin. The raison d’etre of this practice is that physicians – human as they (often) are – only remember and hence only prescribe a limited number of drugs; much fewer than are in existence. Therefore it is important for a pharma company to make sure that physicians know their drugs; they’ll hammer them into their brains (with brute force if necessary!).



Moreover, over the last decade or so, the army of representatives has been expanding with particular vigour. For example, in the US alone, between 1996 and 2000, the herd of quacks with their suitcases full of pills and ointments rose from an already impressive 41,800 to a fearsome 83,000 pharma-suits.

{ Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }

Vaccination has changed little since the time of Louis Pasteur. The method involves deliberately injecting a dead or inactivate organism into a person to stimulate their immune system to produce cells that fight off the fully fledged organism.

However, many infections have resisted all attempts at producing vaccines.

One of these is the herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which is usually the cause of genital herpes.

Now Michal Margalith at Vical, a biopharmaceutical company based in San Diego, says he and colleagues have developed an HSV-2 vaccine using the emerging technology of DNA vaccines.

This involves injecting the patient with a circular piece of DNA called a plasmid that programs their cells to produce HSV-2 proteins that trigger an immune response. That should train the vaccinated person’s immune system to fight off the real virus.

The team says that the technique has successfully produced an immune response in mice. However, DNA vaccines are still highly experimental in humans.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.
The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

I had hemorrhoid surgery in 1973 and have had trouble pooping ever since. I didn’t know that the anus could be sewed up too small until I read the book “Alternatives To Surgery.” My anus won’t stretch any bigger then my middle finger and I am a woman with small hands.

About ten years ago I went to a butt doctor because I had developed numerous tiny bumps on my anus. The first thing he said was “VD WARTS.” I hadn’t had sex that way ever, and it had been nine years since I had sex at all, honest. When he said this I cried for days because I didn’t know how I could have got them. I was told you can get them from an infected toilet seat. I was so upset.

The doctor did the surgery to remove them and had them tested. He said they were skin tags — not harmful or contagious in any way. WHEW! But he wouldn’t fix my small anus so it would stretch to a normal size.

I have read that frequent constipation can cause cancer to develop. You aren’t suppose to take laxatives for a long time so I don’t take them at all. Fiber gives me gas, so I drink a sixteen ounce glass of grapefruit juice every morning and another one after my evening meal to prevent constipation. But sometimes when I am away, it is not possible to get grapefruit juice.

So I get constipated and it is so painful. Who do I call to get help for this problem if a butt doctor won’t help me?

{ PoopReport | Continue reading }

related { Although most people think hemorrhoids are abnormal, they are present in everyone }

photo { William Eggleston }

The recent report that having a pot belly in your 40s roughly triples your risk of dementia in later life is just the tip of an ominous adipose iceberg.

Belly fat — the visceral kind that accumulates around internal organs — has also been linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, gallbladder disease, sleep apnea and numerous cancers.

Having a big belly is even more closely correlated with health problems than obesity in general. Last week, researchers from Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital reported that in a study of 44,636 women, those with waists larger than 35 inches were 79% more likely to die prematurely than those with waists less than 27 inches, even if their weight was normal.

For men, the danger point seems to be 40 inches or more. “These guys with small behinds but big ‘beer guts’ are at greater risk for health problems than men with higher Body Mass Index, but relatively less fat in the abdominal region,” says Rudolph L. Leibel, co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

Two teams of researchers with access to thousands of documents gathered for lawsuits over the painkiller Vioxx allege that Merck waged a campaign of deception to promote its drug, moving slowly to warn of possible hazards while at the same time dressing up in-house studies as the work of independent academic researchers.

The reports in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association in effect accuse one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical makers of various forms of scientific fraud.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

illustration { Tara McPherson }

If your local real estate agent’s face is hanging low these days, it might be more than sadness. The recession’s latest victim is cosmetic surgery. “Plastic surgeons from the Southland to South Florida said some colleagues are struggling to stay in business,” Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports in the Los Angeles Times.

A breast implant company disclosed a decline in surgeries late last year; a laser eye-surgery firm has lowered its forecast based on a similar trend early this year. A professional breast augmenter frets that in January and February, business for some of his colleagues was off 30 percent to 40 percent.

Excuse me while I celebrate. (…)

Depending on how you count it, on an annual basis, the cosmetic-surgery industry—subset of the “luxury healthcare sector” and parent of the “facial aesthetics market”—is now worth $12 billion to $20 billion a year. Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported that last year, among 18 medical specialty fields, the three that attracted med-school seniors with the highest medical-board test scores were the most cosmetically oriented: plastic surgery, dermatology, and otolaryngology.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Esther Haase }

{ “All I want for my birthday is a boob job like Mummy,” says Alicia Douvall’s 12-year-old daughter. | Daily Mail }

related { Nude cell phone pictures now part of teen dating }

A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology is getting wide press coverage for debunking the so-called “8×8″ theory—the popularly held belief that drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water daily helps remove toxins, improve skin tone, and increase satiety, among other health benefits. The authors chalk up the belief to folklore, and newspaper reports claim ignorance as to its provenance. Just how long has this idea been around?

Two-hundred years, at least. The most commonly cited source for the 8×8 myth is the U.S. government-sponsored Food and Nutrition Board. The board’s “Recommended Dietary Allowances” from 1945 include the following advice:

A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.

According to this theory, people ignored the last part of the statement, which points out that you can get most of that water just by eating. If you actually had to drink all 2.5 liters, you’d need around 10 8-ounce glasses per day. (…) However, the Explainer has uncovered evidence of the 8×8 myth going all the way back to 1796, in a German text by Dr. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland called Makrobiotik. The book includes an anecdote about the surgeon general to the king of Prussia, a vibrant 80-year-old man who had “contracted the habit of drinking daily from seven to eight glasses” of cold water and thus “enjoyed much better health than in his youth.”

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { impale }

Michael Hall said he was in SoHo on Saturday to do what people do in SoHo: meet friends, have a meal, browse the galleries and boutiques. But along the way, he stumbled upon something completely different — a storefront offering to analyze his genes.

Mr. Hall, a visitor from Switzerland, was immediately intrigued when he walked into the showroom set up on Greene Street by Navigenics, a California company that recently started selling genetic scans. He said he was curious about his risk of getting the type of cancer that killed his grandparents, but he was not in a hurry to pay the going rate for the information.

For a fee of $2,500, Navigenics will use a saliva sample to analyze a person’s DNA and gauge the risk of contracting one of 18 conditions, including breast cancer, a heart attack and Alzheimer’s disease, company officials said. After that, the company will charge $250 a year to provide updates based on the latest findings about those and other illnesses.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Bruxism is grinding of the teeth, typically accompanied by clenching of the jaw. It is an oral parafunctional activity that occurs to some extent in most humans.

Bruxism often occurs during sleep.

The causes of bruxism are still being studied. The following factors may be associated with the condition:

• High levels of anxiety and/or stress
• Disturbed sleep pattern/other sleep disorders
• Relatively high levels of consumption of caffeinated drinks and foods, such as coffee, colas, and chocolate
• High levels of alcohol consumption
• Smoking
• Digestive problems
• Hypersensitivity of the dopamine receptors in the brain
• Consumption of drugs and medications of the amphetamine-based family, such as MDMA
• Consumption of MDMA and cocaine
• Disorders such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Mikael Vojinovic }