RxISK.org
June 2017
 
 
 

Here's a recap of blog posts and other news from the past month.

The What a Surprise: RxISK Taking Entrepreneurs post on RxISK this month marks something different - a feature of RxISK reporting that has been neglected. When Drugs go into Bodies they do 99 things other than the one thing a company may be focused on. In amongst these 99 other things are new benefits, as well as problems. The best route to new drug discovery still lies in spotting these benefits.

So we would like to ask women who have l ower urinary tract symptoms  ( LUTS ) to consider taking sildenafil or taladafil or one of the other drugs in this group and tell us whether it helps - or not.

For men, there is an unquestioned benefit to taking these drugs for LUTS or for b enign prostatic hyperplasia  (BPH). Your doctor may say this is off-label and be uncomfortable about prescribing but s/he shouldn't be.  

We would love to hear from women and men about any encounters with the medical system you have around trying to access these drugs 

Thank you for your support. 
 
Your feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated.
 
David Healy Signature (First Name)  
 



David Healy, MD

PS. You can find me on Twitter @DrDavidHealy. And you can also  follow RxISK on  Facebook  and  Twitter .


RxISK stories

I suffered from a pretty bad biological anxiety that runs in my family and was very difficult to control without medication. Prior to the timeline of events below, I have taken other medications (Paxil, Effexor, Cymbalta) each causing sexual dysfunction at the lowest possible dose and genital numbness almost immediately upon taking them. I stopped them [...]...»

 

It is worth wading through some slow moving stuff at the start of this post to get to the juicy bits. The Things Drugs Do Drugs do things.  Company marketing divides these things into the one good thing the company wants you to focus on - good for a company bottom-line and the ninety-nine other [...]...»

 

There are two elements to RxISK. One is identifying adverse events in order to keep people safe and to widen our knowledge about what drugs do. But just as important is taking on a power structure that some of us get a glimpse of when we raise the possibility of an adverse event [...] ...»


Dr. David Healy
From David's blog...

When it comes to branded and generic drugs, the listing of key issues in this image misses a trick. The labels are identical. This lack of difference is a consequence of the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act which after two decades of dispute staked out a boundary between generic and branded pharmaceutical companies, part of which in [...]...»

Courts are not a place you can make jokes. I started off with a confident pitch: If you owe a bank a million pounds, you have a problem but if you owe the bank a billion ... I didn't get much further. It felt like several GSK lawyers popped up, addressing the judge with words to the effect that he's talking about banking your honor, this is not his area of expertise. The judge accepted their objections and I didn't get to complete the analogy.[...]...»

This is part three in the Change in Chicago series covering the Dolin trial and its implications.  Like part 1 it is written by  Johanna Ryan - The Dolin Verdict and Playing Go.  By twenty-first century American standards, Stu Dolin's medical care was close to ideal.  That's a hard idea to swallow, given [...] ...»

This is a second post in the Change in Chicago Series looking at the Dolin trial and its verdict.  There will be two more in the series.  Being cross-examined in a legal case involving Pharma is rarely fun.  The lawyers will have done their homework in spades.  As one of them put it [...] ...»

This series of posts on Stewart Dolin's death interrupts a series on how to bring about change . This is not inappropriate as law suits are one of the few ways to bring about change. This post in the series is by a Chicagoan - Johanna Ryan who has been tracking the case since [...] ...»