Medical Blogging

My favorite Medical blogger closed up shop last year and I have been without for a long time! Here are two good articles for y'all to read.

The Blog That Ate Manhattan breaks down the marketing ploys of Big Pharma's newest, gotta have little pill.

But what if we could combine disease awareness with brand name recognition by actually renaming the disease with your drug's brand name? Better still, forget disease recognition altogether. Cast an even wider net and tie your brand name to the symptoms of the disorder. Who cares if other diseases might have the same symptoms? You're going to own that symptom, and then, like a rancher with a
roped calf, brand it.

Growing up, my mother always said that generics were no different than the name brand medicines. She might have been right then, but with the emergence of non-American drugs, can we still be so sure? Dr. Reyes breaks down a recent study for us here.

Translation: one of the ten studies, they found that generic diuretics, AKA “water pills”, a medicine used for water retention and high blood pressure,
didn’t work as well as the name brand product; but what is more upsetting is that two of the seven studies that compared Calcium channel blockers found that the drugs were not equivalent. These medicines are mainly used for high blood pressure, but sometimes used for irregular heart beat.