The Cost of Media Scare Stories to Diabetics

Trevor Butterworth
The current issue of Biocentury, a trade publication that covers the pharmaceutical industry, should be essential and chastening reading for the journalists, editors and politicians who helped turn a limited, problematic study on the risks of the diabetes drug rosliglitazone (brand name Avandia) into a major international health scare.
In a comprehensive report on the [...]

So What Did We Learn From Avandia? (Hint: The Media Are a Hazard to Public Health)

Trevor Butterworth, Huffington Post
Take several critics of the way the FDA ensures the safety of drugs, rush a flawed study into print, characterize the results as catastrophic, rope in drug regulation warriors on Capitol Hill, rant about the evils of Big Pharma, talk to a credulous, statistically-illiterate media, and voila - you have Vioxx II, [...]

New York Times Cherry Picks Data, Sources to Smear Avandia in Advance of FDA Hearing

Trevor Butterworth
The line between the New York Times editorial page, which has been highly critical of the FDA’s handling of the potential risk from the diabetes drug Avandia, and the health news pages appears to have disappeared in the Times’ coverage of the forthcoming FDA hearings on the drug… more
Originally published July 27, 2007

A Crusading Doctor Stumbles On His Own Words

Trevor Butterworth, Huffington Post
As another major scientific journal criticizes the methodology behind a study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that prompted a nationwide panic over a popular diabetes drug, it turns out that the doctor who authored the study, Steven Nissen MD, delivered a blistering attack on those very methods seven years [...]