Medications Category Archives — Page 2 of 65 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

December 5, 2021

New York Times hypes unproven diabetes therapy as a “cure”

Critics are alarmed about a news article published on the front page of the New York Times and headlined: A Cure for Type 1 Diabetes? For One Man, It Seems to Have Worked.

Really? We all fervently wish for a cure for the devastation of diabetes, especially type 1 which starts in childhood. But the problem, savvy readers found, is that the report falls far short of reasonable standards for a global news organization to trumpet the “c” word — cure.

Dig into the 2,000-word piece and skepticism should be the watch word. That’s because reporter Gina Kolata focused on the earliest outcomes of a stem-cell treatment for type 1 diabetes undergoing clinical trials. So far, 17 patients have been treated. One patient, so far, has experienced positive results that have sustained for six months. The New York Times gave no clue about the outcomes for the 16 others.

December 3, 2021

FDA under renewed fire over dubious approval of Alzheimer’s drug

by Patrick A. Malone

Taxpayers and patients are suffering the rising negative consequences of the federal Food and Drug Administration’s dubious decision to overrule its own independent expert advisors and to approve on scant evidence Aduhelm. It is a prescription drug targeting Alzheimer’s disease, and concerns are rising about the medication’s safety and costs, not to mention whether it really works.

FDA advisors had argued against the drug, cautioning that it carries significant potential side effects including swelling and bleeding in the brain. Those taking Aduhelm have been warned to undergo frequent, regular, and pricey brain scans as safeguards.

Still, experts have been startled by a much-discussed death of a 75-year-old Canadian woman, who was taking the drug as part of a clinical trial. She suffered seizures, was hospitalized, had brain scans, and was diagnosed with brain swelling shortly before she died.

November 30, 2021

Ohio jurors fault big pharmacy chains for role in opioid drug crisis

by Patrick A. Malone

The regular folks who make up juries may give more heed than judges and justices do to the how and why of patients’ push for justice in the civil system, as has been shown in yet another bellwether decision involving major drug store chains and claims they contributed to the nation’s worsening opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis.

CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart all contributed substantially to creating a public nuisance by failing to ask appropriate questions and flooding Lake and Trumbull, two Ohio counties, with countless numbers of prescription painkillers, 12 jurors in a Cleveland court found after a six-week trial and 5½ days of deliberation. As the New York Times reported of the lawyers for the plaintiff counties and their successful argument, the “first time the retail segment of the drug industry has been held accountable in the decades-long epidemic….”

“After hearings in the spring, the trial judge will determine how much each company should pay the counties. The verdict — the first from a jury in an opioid case — was encouraging to plaintiffs in thousands of lawsuits nationwide because they are all relying on the same legal strategy: that pharmaceutical companies contributed to a “public nuisance,” a claim that plaintiffs contend covers the public health crisis created by opioids. The public nuisance argument was rejected twice this month, by judges in California and Oklahoma in state cases against opioid manufacturers. The judges found that according to the specifics of their own states’ public nuisance laws, the companies’ activities were too removed from the overdoses and deaths and that the laws had been applied too expansively.

November 24, 2021

With 100,000 deaths, 2021 shatters grim record in opioid crisis

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal officials have confirmed that 2021 will go in the record books as a calamitous time in the battle against the opioid painkiller abuse and overdose crisis, with more than 100,000 U.S. lives lost this year alone to a long-running public health nightmare.

In case anyone might suffer “compassion fatigue” or fail to see how unacceptable this mess has become, news articles in major media offered disconcerting contextual statements, including:

2021’s toll will be the highest of any single year in the crisis, which has killed more than 500,000 Americans over a decade

November 19, 2021

Opioid court cases offer hard evidence: Path to justice can be rocky

by Patrick A. Malone

Patients who say they were injured by wealthy corporations must possess great fortitude as they seek justice in the civil system, as has been reaffirmed by the courts in California and Oklahoma that rejected separate cases involving the harms of prescription painkillers.

All the parties in the two matters agreed that Big Pharma’s opioid drugs have killed a half million Americans over a decade, addicted and debilitated vast numbers of patients, and laid waste to communities across the country.

But in strict legal terms, a trial judge in Orange County, Calif., ruled that pharmaceutical giants would prevail in a lawsuit filed against them by aggrieved California counties. They claimed that, with opioids, “drug manufacturers misled both doctors and patients by downplaying the risks of addiction, overdose, death, and other health complications while overstating the benefits for long-term health conditions,” the Associated Press reported.

November 18, 2021

Workers lose more ground as health insurance costs keep creeping up

by Patrick A. Malone

Most Americans get their health insurance through their jobs, and that coverage continues to increase in cost with the average annual premiums in 2021 exceeding $22,200 for families and $7,700 for individuals — a 4% rise from 2020.

The price increases affecting 155 million non-elderly people with employer-provided coverage, as detailed in the annual Kaiser Family Foundation surve, may seem modest, year over year, especially given that conventional wisdom saw all health care costs hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.

But the foundation notes that overall health coverage costs, borne by employers and their workers, have not spiked due to the coronavirus, though they have risen relentlessly over a decade (see figure, above).

November 15, 2021

Biden nominates Robert Califf to reprise his Obama-era role as FDA chief

by Patrick A. Malone

Robert Califf, a cardiologist and President Biden’s “new” nominee to head the federal Food and Drug Administration, is a familiar face around the agency and Washington, D.C.

Califf served as the FDA commissioner before — winning U.S. Senate confirmation and holding the important post for the last year of the Obama presidency.

He is 70 and has long history in academic medical research and running clinical trials, including consulting for Big Pharma and giving his foes queasiness about his ability to run the nation’s top overseer of prescription medications and medical devices, as well as food quality and safety.

November 14, 2021

$1 trillion invested in ‘infrastructure’ can boost U.S. health and well-being

by Patrick A. Malone

Although the chattering classes may have beat the term infrastructure into a hoary cliché, regular folks may see major benefits over time to their health and well-being from the Biden Administration’s finally passed, bipartisan $1 trillion bill that invests desperately needed money into the nation’s roads, highways, bridges, and more.

The law will send a giant funding surge into improving water quality and eliminating dangerous and antiquated lead pipes. This toxic threat, as evidenced in the mess in Flint, already has resulted in a $600-million-plus settlement — mostly to be paid by the state of Michigan — for residents of the lead-polluted town.

The infrastructure measure will help officials deal with polluting, nerve-wracking, time-sucking transportation logjams, financing repairs and upgrades to public transit, rail, ports, and airports from coast to coast.

November 12, 2021

Patients can’t escape reminders of U.S. health care’s brutal costs

by Patrick A. Malone

Soaring medical costs crush the finances of far too many patients, as the public was reminded by the release of an annual report on the high toll of cancer-care spending and a surprising congressional reverse aimed at reining in runaway prescription drug prices — or at least attempting to.

Leading organizations dealing with cancer treatment — including the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries — found that patients in 2019 (the most recent year data were available) “shouldered a whopping $21.09 billion in costs,” the Washington Post reported.

Patients and their loved ones get hit with major costs in the first year of disease diagnosis, as well as the highest expenses at the ill individuals’ end of life, the report found.

November 3, 2021

Health experts offer anti-drug strategy and fret over cigarette sales spike

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans have gotten stark reminders of the nation’s struggles with harmful substances and how the coronavirus pandemic has worsened these problems, with the Biden Administration outlining its strategy to combat the opioid abuse and drug overdose crisis and Big Tobacco reporting a rare spike in cigarette sales.

The opioid crisis — which is sending the country toward a grim 100,000 fatalities this year alone — has forced the federal government into urgent steps, including “harm reduction” strategies as one of its four pillars of U.S. plans to combat drug abuse, according to Xavier Becerra, head of the Health and Human Services department.

Harm reduction approaches can be controversial, as critics assail them as officials going soft on law enforcement and criminal prosecution of drug use.