Are we misleading women with Breast self-examination?

The latest data seems to suggest so. A new Cochrane review has found the practice doesn’t reduce cancer deaths. What’s more, it may cause harm as women doing the self exams had twice as many biopsies for lesions that were ultimately benign. The latest conclusion supports the 2003 review that came to a similar conclusion. [...]

A Lesson in Business Strategy

Information technology is perhaps the only industry that is as big and complex as healthcare. It remains difficult to predict, has several major players as well as numerous other big ones and is rapidly changing with technology. It is also hampered by certain ways of thinking and old business models. So any great changes and [...]

Sequence your entire DNA in 15 minutes!

Today I took an arterial blood sample from a patient. As soon as I had it in a bag on ice it was sent up a transfer chute to a lab. The blood gas analysis was back in 15 minutes. That’s not bad when you have a patient hyperventilating and his desperate wife asking you [...]

Pets the new Market for Pharma

It’s been a while since my last post. So what better to begin with than a heart warming story about pharma companies repackaging their psychtropic meds for good old Fido. To quote Fiercepharma, “Lilly’s Prozac has become chewable and beef-flavored and dubbed Reconcile, for dogs with separation anxiety. Pfizer’s Anipril treats cognitive dysfunction so elderly [...]

New Pharma Business Models II

What do you do when your major client threatens not to buy your (potentially) most profitable product? At least that was the question JnJ might have been asking themselves when the NHS threatened not to pay for Velcade without a money-back guarantee. Not that Velcade is JnJ’s only highly profitable product – but it could [...]

Medical Tourism: is everybody doing it?

Have you ever met anyone that left Australia for medical treatment? Until I met a girl that went to China for a cheap plastic surgery procedure, I hadn’t either. The only other reason an Australian would leave our shores for treatment is to seek some cutting edge or highly dubious treatment not available here – [...]

Big Pharma not as Evil as many think

It’s the prevalent view amongst medical students in Australia: pharmaceutical companies are mostly evil – or at least bad news for the consumer and developing countries. This view is usually uninformed. I can say this having sat on many student committees, both at the local and international medical student level. This does not mean however [...]

Simple Solutions are the Best

After spending a summer in a Filipino village surrounded by TB patients that had stopped taking their medicine, I wondered what the WHO was coming to. To add to my intrigue was the fact that the villagers lived in grass shacks but many owned satellite dishes and a TV – and virtually all had mobile [...]

The Origin of the great Scientist Species

Where do great scientists come from? Over the centuries we have witnessed some people that have changed science in a remarkable. the Millenium Technology prize is given to one such person every two years and the recipient this year is Robert Langer. Dr. Langer has been cited as “one of history’s most prolific inventors in [...]

E-health Records take a Major Step

Privacy is the major concern in E-health worldwide. Now two recent announcements are blazing a trail towards a solid E-health foundation. NEHTA, the Australian E-health transition authority, has come up with a privacy blueprint, and on the global scale, a large proportion of America’s key players and global IT firms have also reached a consensus [...]