Health Glance
Drug companies are spending millions of pounds every year on all-expenses-paid trips to conferences around the world for doctors and other hospital staff, in what critics say is a massive marketing exercise dressed up as medical education.
Consumers International (CI) said the lack of transparency was unacceptable. "When a medical professional speaks on a health issue, we assume that they are putting patients' interests first. If that person has a conflict of interest because they or their organisation are receiving funding from a drug company the least we should demand is the right to know about it," said Justin Macmullan, head of campaigns. "Pharmaceutical companies will tell you that what they are funding is medical education. But our concern is that this is really highly effective, well-targeted marketing. This throws any notion of impartiality out of the window and jeopardises a doctor's ability to make an informed, balanced decision about the most appropriate treatments."
Two new studies showing that vaccines increase the risk of diabetes have been published in the Open Pediatric Medicine Journal.
The Bush administration has proposed stronger protections for health-care workers who refuse to participate in abortions, issuing a sweeping regulation that could also undercut access to birth-control pills and other forms of contraception.
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may increase women's risk of developing breast cancer and interfere with cancer diagnostic techniques after as little as one year, according to a new large-scale study conducted by researchers from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
A 1999 clinical study that Merck & Co Inc (MRK.N) said was done to test side effects of its now-withdrawn painkiller Vioxx was done primarily to support a marketing campaign before its launch, according to researchers.
It seems as though hemp is not only an answer to our global health problems, both for people who don't have enough to eat and for people in the western world who are malnourished from eating the wrong foods, but also an answer to our environmental crisis.
If all fake fragrances (I call them fakegrances) were banned tomorrow, the world would be a dramatically healthier place by the following day. That's not going to happen, but the more people who refuse to use them in any form, the faster they'll disperse (so to speak). But watch out, those who manufacture products containing fakegrances are sneaky. The word "unscented" usually means that fragrances have been used to cover up fragrances. To actually avoid fragrances you have to look for the words "fragrance free" on the label.
