Medications Category Archives — Page 2 of 58 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

September 8, 2020

Federal pandemic response marked by yet more uproars and confusion

The Trump Administration — yet again — has sowed confusion, frustration, and anger over the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, creating potentially harmful credibility issues for a prospective coronavirus vaccine, the scientific concept of “herd immunity,” a possible blood-based treatment for the illness, as well as testing, contact tracing, and quarantines for the disease.

The White House follies would be considered bad farce, save for the reality that the U.S. death toll races toward 200,000 and infections have skyrocketed past 6 million. The U.S. has 22 percent of the world’s Covid death toll, but only 4 percent of the world’s population.

With schools reopening, infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among children are on the rise.

August 17, 2020

Big Pharma is laying out big cash to try to paint election results red

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Pharma won’t be waiting for the nation’s two major political parties to hit the broadcast airwaves with their presidential nominating conventions to see which candidates will best benefit the profit-ravenous drug industry.

The big pill merchants already have pulled out their corporate checkbooks and rained millions of dollars of donations onto politicians across the country, mostly Republicans but also Democrats, according to Stat, the online science and medicine news site.

To no one’s surprise, the industry cash is going heavily to try to prevent Democrats, who already control the U.S. House, from seizing the U.S. Senate, and maybe the White House, too, Stat reported, based on its scrutiny of political spending by “23 of the biggest drug makers and the two major trade associations: PhRMA and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, known as BIO.”

August 11, 2020

As world takes note of historic nuclear horrors, U.S. Covid carnage surges on

by Patrick A. Malone

Last week the world took note with appropriate solemnity a terrible historic moment: The first military use of nuclear weapons, with explosions 75 years ago of bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The resulting carnage — which the United States said was needed to end the horrors of World War II, especially by averting a bloody land conquest of Japan — has been seared into the global consciousness ever since, especially with the remarkable writing and reporting of author John Hersey.

The exact toll of the bombings of Hiroshima (a famous site shown above) and Nagasaki has eluded historians and other experts because of multiple factors, including: the scale of destruction, the chaos that ensued, and the uncertainty of the population and infrastructure that existed in the already war-torn cities. Still, by many estimates, tens of thousands died immediately — at least 135,000 in Hiroshima and 64,000 in Nagasaki.

August 9, 2020

With 18 billion reasons to doubt Big Pharma, president’s fiats seem iffy, too

by Patrick A. Malone

For those trying to clean up the costly harms that Big Pharma inflicts on Americans, the how-to details not only matter, they can be confounding. For evidence, just ask federal court officials trying to unravel part of the finances of the opioid and overdose crisis, or the Trump Administration’s soggy efforts to deal with skyrocketing prescription drug prices and scary medication shortages.

The latest bedeviling development in the long crackdown on destructive and highly potent prescription painkillers involves Purdue Pharma, the maker of the addictive drug OxyContin, and the U.S. Justice Department.

For months now, courts in New York and Cleveland have sought to negotiate a “global settlement” of thousands of lawsuits, consolidated first in a federal court in Ohio, and claiming that states, counties, cities, Indian tribes, and others have suffered costly harm due to the opioid abuse and overdose crisis.

August 7, 2020

The big Alzheimer’s puzzle: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. Blood, too?

by Patrick A. Malone

It isn’t just the testing for the novel coronavirus that has already anxious Americans upset these days. Controversies also are swirling around existing and developing ways for experts to screen older patients for cognitive decline, namely dementia and its most familiar form, Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for 60%-80% of dementia cases, is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States overall and the fifth leading cause of death for those age 65 and older, researchers say. Medical scientists have engaged in furious efforts for a while now to determine the condition’s causes and to create treatments for it — a response that is sorely lacking now.

But the New York Times reported that experts believe they are nearing a better way to screen and diagnose the illness using the blood rather than current “expensive methods like PET scans of the brain and spinal taps for cerebrospinal fluid.” As reporter Pam Belluck wrote:

July 22, 2020

VA hospital care under fire again after aide pleads to killing seven patients in West Virginia

by Patrick A. Malone

She was a 46-year-old Army veteran hired by the Louis A. Johnson Medical Center in 2015 with no certification or license to care for patients. Reta Mays worked in the middle of the night, tending to elderly, onetime service personnel, sitting bedside and monitoring their vitals, including their blood sugar levels. Mays went room to room, largely unnoticed for three years on Ward 3A.

But as unexplained deaths mounted on the surgical unit between 2017 and 2018, the bespectacled mother of three — who had served in the Army National Guard and had deployed to Iraq and Kuwait — shifted from being a nurse’s aide to becoming a murder suspect.

She now has confirmed in court that she injected multiple doses of insulin in at least seven patients in the rural Veterans Affairs hospital a few hours away from the nation’s capital, causing the frail victims’ blood glucose levels to plunge in fatal fashion.

July 16, 2020

Big Pharma’s pandemic response: Jack up drug prices, set up big vaccine bill

by Patrick A. Malone

How has Big Pharma responded to the dire and uncertain circumstances facing American’s health and pocketbooks? By jacking up prescription drug prices and likely jabbing patients not just in the arm but also the wallet for a prospective coronavirus vaccine.

As the online news and politics site Politico reported:

“Drug makers raised the price of hundreds of medicines during the coronavirus pandemic, even in the face of Trump administration vows to crack down on surging drug costs and efforts to tack price controls on Covid-19 relief packages. Pharmaceutical companies logged more than 800 price increases this year and adjusted the cost of 42 medicines upward by an average of 3.3% so far in July, according to GoodRx, which tracks the prices consumers pay at pharmacies.

July 10, 2020

For Big Pharma, a $648M bribery settlement and heat over anti-viral’s price

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Pharma focuses relentlessly on always making a buck, no matter the cost to the rest of us, and even a viral pandemic that infects 2.8 million Americans and kills roughly 130,000 of us won’t interrupt the corporate rapaciousness.

That’s the reality that federal prosecutors have reminded the public about with an announced $678 million settlement with Novartis over the drug maker’s doctor prescribing- and kickbacks-scheme. And it is what Gilead has shown with its planned pricing for remdesivir. It is an anti-viral drug that has shown modest effect in shortening the course of Covid-19 infections and was developed with taxpayer funding.

The Novartis case also paints a damning picture of doctors’ complicity in taking bribes to defraud taxpayers (specifically the Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs programs) by pushing company products, including the high blood pressure drugs Lotrel, Diovan, Exforge, Tekturna, Valturna and Tekamlo, and the Type 2 diabetes medication Starlix.

July 9, 2020

Opioid abuse and overdoses surge anew, worsened by Covid-19 pandemic

by Patrick A. Malone

With the novel coronavirus crushing the economy and helping to fuel joblessness, individuals’ isolation, and increasing hopelessness and despair among the already troubled, the opioid drug abuse and overdose crisis again is worsening — and fast.

As the Washington Post reported of what had been one of the nation’s leading public health nightmares before the Covid-19 pandemic:

“In Roanoke County, Va., police have responded to twice as many fatal overdoses in recent months as in all of last year. In Kentucky, which just celebrated its first decline in overdose deaths after five years of crisis, many towns are experiencing an abrupt reversal in the numbers. Nationwide, federal and local officials are reporting alarming spikes in drug overdoses — a hidden epidemic within the coronavirus pandemic.

July 7, 2020

Concerns spike as police seek to medicalize tactics that end in arrest deaths

by Patrick A. Malone

The national outage over authorities’ excessive use of force, especially against black men, may take law enforcement, first responders, politicians, and critics into a murky and nightmarish area — call it the unfounded medicalization of official control.

Two fatal flash point cases — involving African Americans George Floyd in Minneapolis and Elijah McCain (shown, right) in a Denver suburb — already have raised disturbing questions about “excited delirium,” a mental health description or diagnosis manufactured by authorities, and whether paramedics should be asked and then if they should administer powerful narcotics to individuals at police request.

As the nonprofit, independent Marshall Project on criminal justice reported about excited delirium: