This week PostScript noted a flurry of reports, posts, and stories on the topic of happiness asking all sorts of things: How achievable is it, how sellable is it, do we stand to lose something human when we lose the blues, and at what cost? At top, a meta

In 2006, New Hampshire became the first state to prohibit pharmacies from selling information about what drugs doctors prescribe. Pharmacies routinely collect and sell information on what drugs individual doctors write prescriptions for, and sell it to co

Monday, Monday This week, our case of the Mondays came with the release of numbers on US health care spending, which topped out at $2.1 trillion in 2006, or 16 percent of the GDP. Prescription drug spending outpaced other health care sectors, growing at

Yesterday, PostScript visited the John Joseph Moakley courthouse in Boston.  After getting a wee bit lost, we made it safely into the U.S. Court of Appeals, which heard the appeal of a decision by the First District Court in New Hampshire last April overt

PostScript saw this in the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, and maybe you did too: A new study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine says that nearly half of physicians surveyed have given a patient a placebo.  According to the Healthblog,

Pfizer's commercials for Lipitor featuring Dr. Robert Jarvik, "inventor of the artificial heart," are probably among the most recognized drug ads on TV today. The ads rely on us viewers assuming that because Dr. Jarvik supposedly invented the artificial

Well, the RxP Weekly Reader is back and ready for a busy year of news and comment on pharma and medical conflicts of interest. But there’s a few things that happened at the end of the last one that need mention before we dive fully into 2008... UMass Medi

A new study conducted by Harvard University researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance bucks an important piece of conventional wisdom about prescription drug samples: They don't primarily go to low-income and uninsured people -- in fact the study found th

Our friends over at PostScript, the blog of the Prescription Project, got in to the holiday spirit last week with a Christmas Carol about the joys of drug sales people pitching their drugs to Doctors, with the aid of data and information sold to them by