Category: public health
Innovation, Collaboration & Big Pharma
BBC Global Business hosted an interesting discussion of how major pharmaceutical companies will be pursuing R&D in the 21st Century, given the lapse of patent protection for a major generation of drugs and changes in the field of medicine. Participants include Freida Lewis Hall, Chief Medical Officer of Pfizer, Patrick Flochel, a partner in Ernst [...]
Can We Prosper in a Slow-Growth World?
Die Welt reports that German researchers are looking at new ways of measuring economic well-being to discern if it is possible to continue to live well in a slow-growing economy: A prerequisite for change is an “expanded definition of prosperity,” the study [by social scientist Meinhard Miegel titled Von der Konsum- zur Wohlstandskultur (“From a [...]
Another Take on Brain Chemistry
We started the week off with an unusual post about how big pharma companies may be using drugs to harm people. We close the week with an equally weird post: Time magazine reports that researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that, used under proper supervision, psilocybin (the “magic mushroom” drug) does not appear to have [...]
Markets and the Mental Illness Epidemic
This isn’t really on topic for our blog, but a recent article in the New York Review of Books by Harvard Medical School faculty member Marcia Angell raises some serious questions about how the pharmaceutical industry goes about its business. As you may know, the reported incidence of mental illness has skyrocketed in the US [...]
MedCottage: Bringing the Nursing Home to the Patient
Just to prove that we don’t think all technology is evil: Springwise recently highlighted a new modular construction technology that could potentially enable people to bring advanced medical care to their homes, rather than having to bring elderly family members to a nursing home: The 12-by-24-foot MedCottage connects to a single-family house’s electrical and water [...]
How Healthy is Your County?
Thanks to a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study by the University of Wisconsin, you can answer that question much more easily. The study put together a wide variety of health and public health indicators to enable citizens, policy makers, health care professionals and others to begin to identify health-related issues in counties throughout the [...]
