ihealthbook: September 20, 2009

Friday, September 25, 2009

U of Minnesota Medical Center

U of Minnesota Medical Center’s nurses ditch their pagers

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Monday, September 21, 2009

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
Extract:
From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an "unusually high" response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

Brainshark Takes on Slideshare

Brainshark Launches Free Service: Takes on Slideshare: "

For the last 10 years, Brainshark has offered a very popular on-demand presentations service for enterprises. While most web services today typically start out by offering free services and then slowly move towards offering paid features, Brainshark is turning this model on its head. While the company already offers a profitable paid product, Brainshark just launched a free version of its service today. MyBrainshark, as this new service is called, was built on top of Brainshark's enterprise product. In terms of its features, MyBrainshark clearly takes on Slideshare and similar services head-on, though the company is mostly targeting business customers for now. While Slideshare also allows its users to upload audio, Brainshark makes this exceptionally easy, as users can actually record their talks right from their phones. MyBrainshark supports PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and PDF documents, as well as most popular video and image formats. These documents can be up to 100MB in size. Once you have uploaded a documents, you can either add audio tracks by uploading additional MP3 files or you can call Brainshark and record the presentation over the phone.