Media release: How Safe Are New Drugs? Market Withdrawal of Drugs Approved in Canada between 1990 and 2009
Open Medicine
A peer-reviewed, independent, open-access journal.FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A York University study of drug safety published today in Open Medicine shows that new drugs are often on the market in Canada for more than three years before they are withdrawn as unsafe, raising concerns about turning to the newest drugs available.
The study by Joel Lexchin, an emergency room physician and professor of the School of Healthy Policy and Management in York’s Faculty of Health, appears in Open Medicine and in the attached PDF.
“As a doctor my policy is not to prescribe new drugs until they have been on the market for a...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - January 28, 2014 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Access to vital information: drug safety edition
With the recent news that the main Health Canada research library in Ottawa has closed, with inter-library loans (i.e. access to Health Canada's irreplaceable collection) outsourced to a private company, we wondered about a possible tie-in with the article we're looking forward to publishing in Open Medicine this week--a troubling report on drug safety and recall rates.
Study author Joel Lexchin, an emergency room physician and professor of the School of Healthy Policy and Management in York’s Faculty of Health, was of course reluctant to draw snap conclusions about how access to the collection in question might affect...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - January 26, 2014 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Luxury journals... time for a boycott?
This year´s Medicine Nobel Prize-winner, cell biologist Randy Schekman, published a commentary in the Guardian a few weeks ago arguing that the incentives that big journals—specifically, Science, Cell and Nature—offer distort the progress of science. (The author is the editor of an open access journal, eLife, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society).
Schekman warns that what he calls “luxury journals” are so invested in promoting their brands that they create artificial scarcity by restricting the number of papers accepted. Like Open Medicine, Schekman ...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - January 1, 2014 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
The shredding of evidence: some holiday reading
Journalist Chris Turner’s new book, “The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada” details, exactly as promised in the title, the devastation of scientific research and evidence-based policy in this country under the leadership of Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. The title borrows a phrase originating in the Chris Mooney’s 1996 book “The Republican War on Science”, which described a similarly ideological agenda in the United States under George W. Bush, and which has been adapted to contemporary Canada by David Suzuki as well as less prominent critics of the...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - December 16, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Crispr-CAS9 and the promise of simple gene editing
A top story for this year has got to be the Crispr-CAS9 technique for targeted gene editing. Many of you will be aware of this exciting development in genetics. It’s gotten a fair bit of breathless and sometimes incomprehensible science media coverage lately (Crispr, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, were discovered in bacteria back in the late 80s but considered “junk DNA”; seminal research on use of the Crispr-associated enzyme CAS9 in gene editing was published by Jennifer Doudna and Emanuelle Charpentier last August; since then it’s been tested on numerous different organisms; as of...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - December 10, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Healthy food policies at risk
The Globe & Mail has a story about our most recent commentary, on the cluttering of Canadian federal government food policy committees with food sector representatives whose financial interest isn’ t necessarily the same as the public interest in policy supporting a healthy diet--and so better health for Canadians. You can see the article, by journalist Carly Weeks, right here.
Topics: food policymediahealthy diet (Source: Open Medicine Blog -)
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - December 3, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Pressing the Open Access Button
The world of open information is so new and humming with ideas that it’s hard to divine what’s likely to stick. This is a good place to check out some of the newest initiatives.
Here’s one:
Open Access Button lets anyone flag incidents where they seek and are denied access to research findings because they are under subscription. It’s an innovative way of beginning to establish the real cost of not moving to open access models. On the website, a map shows a running tally of button clicks so that you can see that, so far, 873 paywalls have been hit by Open Access Button users. The geographic distribution seems to re...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - November 21, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
The end of antibiotics, period?
Twenty years ago, I wrote a paper for my high school biology class on the not-much-discussed topic of antibiotic resistance. What I learned seemed like science fiction; due to overuse and improper use of antibiotics, we faced a return to the dark ages before penicillin, when a chance infection could easily spell death and doctors were largely helpless in the face of them.
But after writing my essay, life went on. When I got sick, antibiotics were readily available. I remained wary of antibacterial cleansers and other bacteria-bashing products, but essentially, it seemed that I’d been a bit alarmist.
And yet, over the yea...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - November 8, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Media release: Trends in HIV prevalence, new diagnoses, and mortality in Ontario
Open MedicineA peer-reviewed, independent, open-access journal.FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASETrends in HIV prevalence, new HIV diagnoses, and mortality among adults with HIV who entered care in Ontario,1996/1997 to 2009/2010: a population-based studyOpen Medicine <http://www.openmedicine.ca/> is pleased to publish the attached paper, which fills a gap in information about who gets diagnosed with HIV and who enters treatment for HIV in Ontario.
Until now, we have not had an informed picture of persons with HIV in Ontario who have accessed care. For the first time, researchers used Ontario’s administrative healthcare databa...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - October 24, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
About Science and open access
In a clever sting operation, Science magazine revealed recently that many of the open access science journals that have proliferated in the last few years are not what they ought to be.
As you can read in much more detail here, the magazine worked with researchers to create a sham article, convincing in many ways but fundamentally flawed both ethically and in experimental design. Any competent peer reviewer should have caught the problems and rejected the article.
Instead, over half of the 304 journals that received the paper accepted it.
Some open access journals such as PLOS ONE (which Science says was the only one to fl...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - October 24, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Dr. Loubani released from detention at last; still in Cairo
We'd like to thank our readers who joined the tens of thousands of others who petitioned the Canadian government, called the Egyptian embassy and showed their support for our colleague, Dr. Tarek Loubani. As you will have heard by now, Tarek and filmmaker John Greyson (who was travelling with him on a medical mission to Gaza when the pair were arrested in Cairo) were released from prison on Sunday morning after fifty days in detention without charges.
We have been in contact with Tarek and he is well and in good spirits despite the ordeal. We were concerned to learn that Tarek and John have been as yet unable to leave Egyp...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - October 9, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
On physician compensation
Today's Globe and Mail does put it neatly: "Canada has more doctors, making more money than ever". Although it really needs a much closer and sensitive look.
And although it can get confusing, it would be an interesting article to cross-reference with our recent study on the trend towards hospital-based physicians, which shows that in Ontario, at least, we're seeing more high-volume, hospital-based physicians at the same time as we're seeing fewer low-volume specialists and internists.
When speaking with the lead author, I actually found it hard to grasp the implications of the different trends observed, and maybe we can ...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - September 27, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Of capitation (but not decapitation)
While not as good as a headline incorporating 'capitation'*, today's Globe and Mail does put it neatly: "Canada has more doctors, making more money than ever". Although it really needs a much closer and sensitive look.
And although it can get confusing, it would be an interesting article to cross-reference with our recent study on the trend towards hospital-based physicians, which shows that in Ontario, at least, we're seeing more high-volume, hospital-based physicians at the same time as we're seeing fewer low-volume specialists and internists.
When speaking with the lead author, I actually found it hard to grasp the imp...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - September 27, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Yesterday, at the rally outside the Egyptian consulate in Montreal....
Outside the tallest skyscraper in Montreal, the mood was somber. Tuesday, September 24 marked the thirty-ninth day since two Canadians were arrested and arbitrarily imprisoned in Cairo on their way to the Gaza strip. Friends, family, colleagues and supporters of Tarek Loubani and John Greyson filled the corner of De la Gauchetière and Mansfield, under the shadow of the tower that houses the Egyptian consulate. They rallied for the immediate release of the two men, promising never to forget them. “Free Tarek and John, Free Tarek and John,” chanted the crowd. The editorial team and supporters of Open Medicine wait wit...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - September 25, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
Tarek Loubani's and John Greyson's freedom is our freedom: an OM editorial
Two Canadians, Dr. Tarek Loubani and Professor John Greyson, were arrested on August 16th in Cairo, Egypt. They remain in prison, without formal charges. They are 9 days into a hunger strike, hoping to gain attention to their plight. Despite international attention, little is known about the details surrounding their incarceration, or plans for their release.
Both were en route to the Gaza Strip where Loubani, an emergency physician from London, Ontario, leads a project training health workers at Al-Shifa Hospital, the country's largest. Greyson, an award-winning filmmaker and professor at York University in Toronto, ac...
Source: Open Medicine Blog - - September 25, 2013 Category: Medical Publishers Authors: Carlyn Zwarenstein Source Type: blogs
