Thanks to Envisioning 2.0 for pointing us to Mark Senak's Eye on the FDA blog. Envisioning found his breakdown of the presidential candidates' health care and pharmaceutical platforms super-interesting, and so did we.
Another interesting blog we've recently run across is The HIV/AIDS Shill Factor, http://shillfactor.net (Howard Brody wrote about it here.)
The epigraph is tiny font in parentheses, but the message is bold:
(If you were bringing in an additional $50,000-$100,000 a year with very little effort, shuttling about rich countries extoling the merits of lifelong polypharmacy to clinicians less clever, less compeling than yourself -- loads of fancy dinners & hotels, business class travel, furtive financial exchanges, would you stray from the script?)
The rest of the text on the site is a bit small, too, but PostScript appreciates the simplicity of the format and the detail sorted into categories of who: Who controls research, who votes on new drugs, who sets treatment specs, who educates the field on HIV/AIDS....Though medical conflicts of interest are complex creatures, being up front about them isn't -- it's essential.
As we browsed through the Arial 10 pt. font lists of "Paid consulting for" "speaking fees from" and "stock ownership," we couldn't help but think: If these guys and gals did this with a word processor and the internet, can't be too much trouble to ask researchers and doctors to do it, too.