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Category: forbes
Let me begin here by acknowledging that I am big fan of Matthew Herper's medical reporting at Forbes, enough so that any day now I may charter a Madison, Wisconsin based fan club and start passing out leaflets and lapel pins.
His work on the business of big pharma and how it works, his insights into the actual pharmaceutical products are clear, rational,...
For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts...
For those who have followed my discussions here about industry-produced blog posts at ScienceBlogs and at Forbes, you might be interested to know that this is not a new phenomenon. Long before "blog" entered our lexicon, E.B. White, the eminent prose stylist--who, to my knowledge, was not especially known as a defender of journalistic mores--railed against a similar situation in Esquire magazine--in 1976!
David Cay Johnston reminds us of the episode,...
In July, as...
In July, as we noted here, a controversy over corporate blogs masquerading as news sent some of the smartest folks at ScienceBlogs fleeing to other nests. Most have now settled down somewhere, and, I'm happy to say, are back at work. David Dobbs and Maryn McKenna are now at Wired Science. Deb Blum is blogging at PLoS. Rebecca Skloot, as far as we can tell, is still touring for her book and has not resurfaced with a blog, although I do see her on Twitter...
In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors...
In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors have encountered over the millenia, tried to understand, and sometimes learned to treat. In psychiatry, illnesses are decided by committees. No matter how bad you feel, you can't have one unless you meet the requirements the committees have established.
I'm talking, of course, about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You might think you're depressed, but if you don't meet the criteria in the manual, nobody else will think so--including, notably, your physician and your insurance company.
I could go on--I've written about this cookbook-recipe approach to medicine before, and I always enjoy it. But I learned something today that I didn...
Too many anecdotal ledes read as if their only purpose is to push the news down into the fourth or fifth graf. They add nothing...
Too many anecdotal ledes read as if their only purpose is to push the news down into the fourth or fifth graf. They add nothing to the story and seem as if they were written because feature stories are supposed to have anecdotal ledes--everyone knows that!
Here's the way an anecdotal lede is supposed to work:
Two years ago Ronald Stemp, a plumber from Georgetown, Tex., started having strange symptoms, including forgetfulness, problems concentrating and bouts of depression. His wife became worried that he had been exposed to toxins at work. On the Web she found a place in Austin called Care Clinics that claimed to treat heavy metal poisoning...
O.K., I'm on the ride with this one. I want to know what's up with this guy. We soon find out that he was billed $180,000 for a...
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