Pharma Veterans

Colossal Wrongdoings by Big Pharma – Servier – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1094 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1094 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Andres Ayrton Credit: Annushka Ahuja Credit: Artem Podrez Preamble For decades, benfluorex – sold under the brand name ‘Mediator’, was marketed as a diabetes and weight-loss drug by French pharmaceutical giant Servier Laboratories. Hailed as a useful tool to help overweight patients manage their health, Mediator was widely prescribed in France and a few other countries from the mid-1970s until 2009. But beneath its therapeutic promise lurked a dangerous reality: the drug was linked to serious, and often fatal, heart valve problems and pulmonary hypertension. By the time it was pulled off the market, Mediator was estimated to have caus...

The Greed in Healthcare System – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1048 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 1048 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com for publishing our contributions here. Credit: Anna Shvets Credit: Andrea Piacquadio This post is inspired by an article by Donald M. Berwick, published in JAMA – Journal of American Medical Association. Link at the end. Preamble The healthcare in most countries has become a huge profit-making industry. Hospitals, physicians, pharmacies, drug suppliers are all part of the profiteering. The healthcare institutions advertise that ‘they keep the patient in the center’; this appears true. They do keep the patients in the center to slaughter them financially, mercilessly.  I am borrowing from the JAMA® article mentioned above, which is titled ‘Salve Lucrum: The Existential Threat of Greed in US Health C...

Where is the Patient in Healthcare Landscape?  – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 963 Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post 963 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to aq.pharmaveterans@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here. Credit: Azra Tuba Demir Credit: Jonathan Borba Credit: LLos Muertos Crew Credit: Max Mishin Preamble Health and education are important subjects for politics and therefore get new ideas whenever a new government comes in. It is however a pity that previous government initiatives are usually scraped by the new government. Some may be baptized with a new name and launched again. In the education sector, Danish school was the last major initiative in Punjab which, surprisingly, is still running well. Sehat Card was the last major initiative from the PTI government. Present incumbent government has raised questions about it and its fate is still hang...

State of Healthcare in Pakistan – Part 7 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #790 Dear Colleagues!  This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #790 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans welcome sharing of knowledge and wisdom by Veterans for the benefit of Community at large. Pharma Veterans Blog is published by Asrar Qureshi on  WordPress, the top blog site. Please email to asrar@asrarqureshi.com for publishing your contributions here. Photo Credit: Edward Jenner Photo Credit: Ksenia Chernaya Photo Credit: MART Productions Healthcare stands on three pillars: Healthcare related policies; Public and private health infrastructure; and availability of diagnostic and treatment tools, the last one also includes easy access to drugs. We shall review each of these in some detail to understand the entire healthcare landscape. The information is gathered from several sources, and references are given at the bottom. Diagnostic and Treatment Infrastructure – Issues and Opportunities We take up the third (...