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Editorial: "...but the fact of the matter is�"

How many times do you hear those words during a political interview? This raises some interesting questions:

1. Does that mean that everything they have said up to that point is not fact?
2. Are they just going to give you "one" fact and let the rest go?
3. Is it really a "fact" that they are going to tell you or is it just more "opinion"?
4. What is a "fact"?

A "fact" is defined as something done; something presented as objectively real; something that has been objectively verified; something having real, demonstrable existence; the quality of being real or actual.

I usually do not hear an interviewer ask for "documentation" of the "fact" they are stating. And, if they ever are asked, it's sometimes a newspaper article based on opinion, a report from some agency that is oftentimes flawed, or some other questionable source.

Does this just occur in politics? No, the medical sciences have taken major hits the past couple of years resulting from greed and the publication of ghost-written stories, biased research results, and now even going back to the 1990s and retracting stories of the relationship of vaccines and autism.

From politics to science, we are "inundated" with "facts" that are "not facts." As so much of pharmacy practice today is based on published articles, we, too, are guilty of treating these published articles as "facts" when they may or may not be. Maybe we should state that "such and such an article says�" so we don't be appearing to state "facts."

Also, we need to hold our politicians and governmental agencies to "facts" and not "hearsay" and "opinions."


Loyd V. Allen, Jr., Ph.D., R.Ph.
Editor-in-Chief

Compounded Drugs May be Restricted in California
Legislation is proposed in California to limit prices of medically necessary compounded medications; the proposal is backed by corporations, insurers, and labor groups. This action is the result of a sharp rise in bills submitted to California's biggest workers' comp insurer. The backers say the prescribing of these drugs has become filled with abuse.

The proposed legislation would limit prices of medically necessary compounded drugs by adding them to the government's fee schedule.

A lobbyist for the California Coalition on Workers' Comp, which includes Walt Disney Co., Marriott International Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., and more than 200 other employers in the public and private sectors says, "This is one we're getting out ahead of early". They also say the bill is needed to ensure that bottom-feeders and cheaters of the system aren't rewarded.

There has been a sharp increase in the use of compounded drugs reaching $28 million, or 24% of the fund's total prescription billings last year. In the previous year, the number was so low that the State Fund didn't bother to track it.

The director of the California Department of Industrial Relations said there is no doubt about it that there are people "gaming" the system, but the fine line in this is to identify where legitimate medicine is being applied and abuse is beginning.

Outside the increase in billings, no one has been able to point to systematic evidence of widespread abuse. For one insurance company, compounded drugs soared to 44% of all prescription claims last year from 9.6% the previous year.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-compound-drugs-20101228,0,3607947.story

Study Linking Vaccine to Autism was Fraudulent
Ten of the 13 authors of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. Still, the suggestion that the MMR shot was connected to autism influenced parents worldwide and immunization rates for measles, mumps, and rubella have never fully recovered.

A new examination found that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records. The analysis found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. The investigator also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.

British Medical Journal editor Fiona Godlee and colleagues called Wakefield's study "an elaborate fraud" and said Wakefield's work in other journals should be examined to see if it should be retracted. Wakefield was stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain last year.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/05/AR2011010505105.html

Avastin in the News Again as Firms Fight Move to the Cheaper Anti-Blindness Drug
In the UK, the NHS has moved a step closer to obtaining a cheap drug to prevent the leading cause of blindness, in spite of attempts by drug companies to block it. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which decides which drugs may be prescribed on the NHS, has decided to move towards an official appraisal of the drug Avastin that has been widely and cheaply used to prevent wet age-related macular degeneration-even though the drug companies that make and market it refuse to seek a license; they have a licensed version which is many times more expensive.

Ophthalmologists in the U.S. discovered that-split into tiny doses suitable for injection into the eye-Avastin could halt and even reverse the progress of wet AMD, which is the commonest cause of blindness. Eye specialists around the world have been using Avastin in this way because splitting a vial into many tiny doses makes it relatively cheap.

But the manufacturer, Genentech, and the Swiss drugs company Roche, which markets Avastin in Britain, have fought this use. Genentech has produced and licensed a very similar but far more costly version, which it calls Lucentis, and which has been approved by Nice for the NHS.
http://pharmalive.com/news/index.cfm?articleID=752612&categoryid=9&newsletter=1

Government May Cut Foreign Direct Investment to 49 percent in Pharma Industry
India's government is expected to consider slashing the foreign direct investment (FDI) limit in the pharmaceutical sector in order to bring down the prices of drugs, chiefly essential drugs. A cap of 49% is being considered. Currently, the FDI limit in the sector stands at 100 percent through the automatic route. India's government fears that 100 percent FDI will lead to uncontrolled mergers and acquisitions by foreign drug firms, which could lead to further increase in drug prices. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/125469/Business/govt-may-cut-fdi-in-pharma-sector.html

�that it was reported this week (fact?) that most young adults get their news from the Internet?

Fact-Checking
Check out your facts. With more and more "contradictory studies" being published, it becomes more important to "check out your facts" as best as can be done.