"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - HL Mencken
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"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." - Confucius
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"The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease" - Sir William Osler
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" The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power." - Bob Sutton
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"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them - well, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple." - Charles Mingus
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"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." - Albert Einstein
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"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around." - Talking Heads, Life During Wartime
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"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary. Go and learn it." - Hillel, Talmud, Shabbath 31a
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"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing." - Thomas Sowell
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"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - HL Mencken
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"If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." - Abraham Maslow
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"A great teacher is one who realizes that he himself is also a student and whose goal is not to dictate the answers, but to stimulate his students creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves." - Herbie Hancock
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"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Nietzsche
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"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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Workouts by month - Goal 200 from 11/1/09 through 10/31/10
A note to the professors, from the "real" world, on the use of ICDs in a fee for service community... http://ow.ly/1jaPy - great postMarch 13, 2010 2:19
RT @paulinechen: New "Doctor and Patient"; Learning to Keep Patients Safe in a Culture of Fear http://nyti.ms/bYA14V - blog post comingMarch 12, 2010 1:35
RT @tom_peters: @kevinmd Spoken like an MD. - true primary care is very complex - it is not simple care -March 11, 2010 12:43
RT @efalchuk: Seriously, what is Nancy Pelosi Talking About? http://bit.ly/9sHSc2 #healthreform #hcr #healthcare think Dazed and ConfusedMarch 10, 2010 7:53
Obama Says Health Overhaul Should Trump Politics - http://nyti.ms/bwKRyo - and he is correctMarch 8, 2010 7:28
@BertDecker multiples of 37 - trivial - any factor of 111 would factor into the others. The key here is that 37 * 3 = 111March 7, 2010 9:00
RT @dmrind: Meta-analysis and New Knowledge http://bit.ly/awMtmT important and well statedMarch 7, 2010 12:10
@autolycos while books need no batteries - they are expensive to produce and use resourcesMarch 6, 2010 3:02
Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, pleaded guilty yesterday and agreed to pay $430 million to resolve criminal and civil charges that it paid doctors to prescribe its epilepsy drug, Neurontin, to patients with ailments that the drug was not federally approved to treat.
Obviously, Mr. Fembup must be a drug rep or work for the industry. No one would surely be so blind to see that it is not the physicians decision nor the industries decision as to how a drug is used. Without proper clinical trials, how do we know this drug wasn’t….isn’t harmful when pushed on the wrong patient.
Lets face it, Pfizer’s hands aren’t exactly clean on giving out bribes and highly influencing physicians prescription decisions. If Mr. Fembup is a physician, maybe he needs help and should check out this website http://www.nofreelunch.org/
I don’t think the $430 million payoff will put a dent in Pfizer’s funds. Not to mention they can use their $49.15 billion income to influence the FDA to make Neurontin an OTC drug.
ugh, that nofreelunch site is a bore. we have students here that constantly push that, as opposed to saying that maybe the responsibility lies with the individual physician to make moral choices in the interests of their patients, not themselves.
regarding the decision, i commented on it a few days back. i believe that both pfizer and the physicians are in the wrong. let’s face it, if physicians weren’t being convinved to offer said drug off-label without studies demonstrating efficacy, this story wouldn’t exist. pfizer started it, but physicians easily could’ve ended it by saying “no thanks”.
“Obviously, Mr. Fembup must be a drug rep or work for the industry. No one would surely be so blind to see that it is not the physicians decision nor the industries decision as to how a drug is used.”
Yeh, right, “obviously” except then you say maybe I’m a physician? Or maybe I’m something else? I guess that’ll cover it, huh, liljohn??
I have nothing to do with the drug industry. Nothing.
But I obviouskly did ask a question, which you just as obviously ignore.
But you do seem to believe that physicians are utterly powerless to resist the influence of Pfizer “bribery”. Thus you accuse physicians of complictiy in the Pfizer “bribert” and moral laxity at the same time, do you not?
Might I add that I would pray NEVER to be defended by the likes of you.
I don’t know enough about it to comment on the bribery issue, but we don’t want this to become an issue of off-label uses no longer being available to physicians. If that were true, we could only use Paxil to treat anxiety d/o instead of other SSRIs. As for Neurontin, the fact it is an excellent, relatively safe second line therapy for peripheral neuropathies when TCAs don’t work. It’s expensive and I prefer TCAs because of cost, but it’s as effective if not more. Neurologists will not abandon their use of it for this.
The FDA probably needs to address off-label use and liberalize their process for adding indications.
7 Responses to Pfizer gets penalized
John Anderson
May 17th, 2004 at 8:45 pm
Oy weh!
John Fembup
May 18th, 2004 at 1:09 am
And it seems “just” because . . . ?
Because this medication is no longer available to diabetics ?
Because diabetics can no longer take this medication until the FDA eventually approves it?
Because docs would never have placed their patients at risk, nor compromised their professionalism, had it not been for Pfizer pushing cash at them?
Because the docs who took the payments aren’t included in the decision?
Because Pfizer, which bought Warner Lambert, got nailed for Warner Lambert’s behavior?
Because the FDA which is notoriously slow to approve label uses of drugs dragged its feet on this one, and then decided to extort cash from Pfizer?
Because the lawyers get 50% of the setlement?
Why is this “just”?
Carl Lindemann
May 18th, 2004 at 6:21 am
Nice payoff to the whistle blower! Hmm. I wonder if this strategy can help with my overhead!
Lil' John
May 18th, 2004 at 8:54 am
Obviously, Mr. Fembup must be a drug rep or work for the industry. No one would surely be so blind to see that it is not the physicians decision nor the industries decision as to how a drug is used. Without proper clinical trials, how do we know this drug wasn’t….isn’t harmful when pushed on the wrong patient.
Lets face it, Pfizer’s hands aren’t exactly clean on giving out bribes and highly influencing physicians prescription decisions. If Mr. Fembup is a physician, maybe he needs help and should check out this website
http://www.nofreelunch.org/
I don’t think the $430 million payoff will put a dent in Pfizer’s funds. Not to mention they can use their $49.15 billion income to influence the FDA to make Neurontin an OTC drug.
poormedicalstudent
May 20th, 2004 at 1:32 pm
ugh, that nofreelunch site is a bore. we have students here that constantly push that, as opposed to saying that maybe the responsibility lies with the individual physician to make moral choices in the interests of their patients, not themselves.
regarding the decision, i commented on it a few days back. i believe that both pfizer and the physicians are in the wrong. let’s face it, if physicians weren’t being convinved to offer said drug off-label without studies demonstrating efficacy, this story wouldn’t exist. pfizer started it, but physicians easily could’ve ended it by saying “no thanks”.
John Fembup
May 23rd, 2004 at 6:20 pm
“Obviously, Mr. Fembup must be a drug rep or work for the industry. No one would surely be so blind to see that it is not the physicians decision nor the industries decision as to how a drug is used.”
Yeh, right, “obviously” except then you say maybe I’m a physician? Or maybe I’m something else? I guess that’ll cover it, huh, liljohn??
I have nothing to do with the drug industry. Nothing.
But I obviouskly did ask a question, which you just as obviously ignore.
But you do seem to believe that physicians are utterly powerless to resist the influence of Pfizer “bribery”. Thus you accuse physicians of complictiy in the Pfizer “bribert” and moral laxity at the same time, do you not?
Might I add that I would pray NEVER to be defended by the likes of you.
Aporkalypse
July 10th, 2004 at 5:03 am
I don’t know enough about it to comment on the bribery issue, but we don’t want this to become an issue of off-label uses no longer being available to physicians. If that were true, we could only use Paxil to treat anxiety d/o instead of other SSRIs. As for Neurontin, the fact it is an excellent, relatively safe second line therapy for peripheral neuropathies when TCAs don’t work. It’s expensive and I prefer TCAs because of cost, but it’s as effective if not more. Neurologists will not abandon their use of it for this.
The FDA probably needs to address off-label use and liberalize their process for adding indications.