It’s time to set ourselves up for success in managing chronic illness
Obesity, and its evil cousins diabetes and heart disease, are not going to be cured by more doctor visits. It’s going to take a complete remake of our environment.
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Are we getting too much medicine?
Three times as much per-capita healthcare spending as the UK, five times as many CT scans as Germany, twice as much spending in McAllen as El Paso, Texas – what’s going on? Americans are consuming more medicine than is good for them…and evidently getting no healthier than people in other countries who spend and consume far less. But why?
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Editorial: Money, sex, fame, and power – understanding motivation
Everyone loves a bargain but Americans, in particular, are voracious of consumers of, well, just about everything. In our age of budget deficits and exploding healthcare costs, what motivates both doctors and patients to continue pushing healthcare spending through the roof?
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Editorial: Beyond the headlines: understanding H1N1 vaccine availability
In today’s world of hotel-room crystal meth labs and designer drugs from ‘head shops’, why can’t our best and brightest scientific minds create a life-saving vaccine on target and on time?
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Will that be hollandaise with your egg, or a side of vaccine?
With so much warning of the HIN1 flu pandemic, why don’t governments and the pharma industry have enough vaccine in time for this flu season? As Dr Dennis Gross explains, for vaccines, the process defines the product. Change the process and you might lose clinical efficacy. The processes for vaccine production – even in 2009 – are fraught with sometimes more art than science.
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ISPOR EU 2009: Bringing the Eiffel Tower into Perspective
Getting a drug approval, reimbursement, and access to markets is a long journey, but we are not alone. The focus on this year’s ISPOR EU annual conference was on health technology assessment in different countries. Is an international appraisal system likely in the near future?
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Editorial: Great minds think alike
One of the best outcomes of our ever-shrinking world is the opportunity to meet colleagues from other countries, to learn their best practices, share ‘war stories’ of failed attempts, and garner new ideas for solutions in our respective home countries. ISPOR held its annual meeting in Paris, France last week, with a focus on health technology assessment processes worldwide.
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A UK perspective: how can the US have reform without rational debate?
In recent rounds of the US healthcare debate, ‘rational debate’ seems to have been replaced with scare tactics, in the mainstream media at least. The UK healthcare system recently came under heavy criticism by the anti-reform lobby.
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Editorial: US healthcare reform debate devolves into namecalling
The American public still has surprisingly few details about the proposed legislation for healthcare reform. In this knowledge vacuum, hyperbole and political fighting rush in.
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Exorcising the ghosts of medical writing
There’s been much rattling of chains lately on the subject of ghost writing in medical journals. David Woods, PhD, a writer and former journal editor discusses the lack of clarity on what is an author, a ghost author, and a guest author.
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