Pharmaceuticals Anonymous

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Dollars for Docs Widget

The Dollars for Docs Widget from ProPublica lets you track which doctors/health care providers are taking Pharma money.

"As part of ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs” series and interactive news application, we've created a small widget that you can embed on your web site. It will let your readers look up whether their health care providers are taking money from the drug companies in our database. The widget shows the amount of money paid to each practitioner in our database, which company made the payment, and in some cases, what the companies saidthey were paying for: speaking fees, consulting, etc. The widget also lists what drugs each company sells so readers can check their own prescriptions.
We’ll be keeping this data up-to-date roughly quarterly, and the widget running on your site will always have the latest data."

http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/use-our-dollars-for-docs-widget-on-your-site

We are going to grab this gadget, and hope you do too!

Thursday, December 9, 2010

WikiLeaks cables: Pfizer used dirty tricks to avoid clinical trial payout


"The world's biggest pharmaceutical company hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial drug trial involving children with meningitis, according to a leaked US embassy cable.
Pfizer was sued by the Nigerian state and federal authorities, who claimed that children were harmed by a new antibiotic, Trovan, during the trial, which took place in the middle of a meningitis epidemic of unprecedented scale in Kano in the north of Nigeria in 1996.
Last year, the company came to a tentative settlement with the Kano state government which was to cost it $75m.
But the cable suggests that the US drug giant did not want to pay out to settle the two cases – one civil and one criminal – brought by the Nigerian federal government."

Link at The Guardian

Shades of John le Carre's The Constant Gardener...



You can help fight these crimes - at The Constant Gardener Trust

Friday, December 3, 2010

Welcome! Looking for Information About Getting Off Meds?

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Browse through the Links in the right-hand column for a wealth of resources, or use the Search utility to see the articles we have collected by topic.

USA: Desperate jobless pharmacists?


"Do yourself and favor and start looking now," he wrote in the ad. "When you lose your job, you will interview from a position of weakness."
With the U.S. unemployment rate still soaring at 9.8 percent and 6.3 million Americans having been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, employers can now afford to be extremely picky about whom they hire. In addition to seeking very specific skills, degrees, and numbers of years of experience, many employers are specifying in job ads that candidates be "currently employed" elsewhere to be considered for the position.
Inokon, who has worked in staffing and recruiting for almost 15 years, said he has trouble placing jobless pharmacists because the reality of today's job market is that employers "want somebody who's wanted."
"When you show desperation in your face and your tone during an interview, management is going to pick up on that vibe. They're gonna feel it and see it and notice something's off," he told HuffPost. "It's like somebody who hasn't been on a date in a while -- they're awkward, and the other person's gonna be turned off. It's always better for a person to interview while they're employed."


Why would pharmacists be jobless? Who's next? 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/03/employers-wont-hire-the-u_n_791710.html