Fairly quietly the effectiveness of this year’s flu vaccine in different ages groups has been released. Previously, Australis’s chief medical officer Professor Brendan Murphy, said this season’s vaccine, selected by the WHO, gave “moderate to good”...
The use of antidepressants has exploded over the last 20 years. It is estimated that one in ten people in the USA is on them and as many as one in four women in their 40’s and 50’s. In Australia, the numbers are not as high but not far behind. Yet despite the...
Some numbers are so big that one can struggle to comprehend them. Fierce Pharma reported that in the decade from 2007, drugs losing their patents had total sales of $US915 billion. Of this over US$200 billion was in sales of statin medications. A tablet for high blood...
Every year a number of new drugs come onto the market. Some are greeted with fanfare while others just slide in. There is an assessment process to bring pharmaceuticals to market to show that they are safe, that they work and that side effects are acceptable. To get a...
There was an interesting review published in The Lancet about the placebo rate in use of antidepressants. The review found that that the placebo response rate had remained steady over the last 20 years – at around 40%. What was even more interesting was the way this...
Conflicting views have again emerged about statin medications in two leading British Medical Journals. Statins are used to lower cholesterol and have been the best selling drugs of the past 25 years with sales in the tens of billions of dollars. The Lancet published a...
