Prescription For Power
​Patient Groups Raking In Big Pharma Dough
Even as these patient groups grow in number and political influence, their funding and their relationships to drug makers are little understood. Unlike payments to doctors and lobbying expenses, companies do not have to report payments to the groups.
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Ethics of Drug Sales
​Drug Industry Payments and Gifts to Physicians
Though drug reps ultimately want to push their drugs, more than gifts, they also bring the ready-made synthesized knowledge about the drugs, something the busy physicians, starving for time to read the literature themselves, find hard to let go. 
Stayed Overseas For Insulin
​Went For School
​ Many Western nations, including England and Canada empower their governments to actively negotiate prescription drug prices. The U.S. has no such system in place. 
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Expensive Insulin
How Insulin Prices Tripled
Diabetics in the US are doing everything they can to get the drug which allows them to continue to live – insulin.  Around since the 1920’s, the cost has risen over the past decade three-fold. 
Oxycontin Horror Show
How America Got Hooked
From 1996 to 2002, Purdue pursued nearly every avenue in the drug supply and prescription sales chain -- a strategy now cast ass reckless and illegal.
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Against Oxycontin
​One Women’s Crusade Is Paying Off
In 2007, Purdue paid fines totaling $634 million for expanding the opioid crisis. The executives served no time. The company was allowed to continue aggressively marketing its product, and the following year, sales of OxyContin reached $2 billion.
Dogma vs Science
The Pulse Oximetry Story 
Each year a new generation of smartphone is released, and it seems ironic that a patient can be dying of undetected sepsis while connected to a 21st century monitor incapable of recognizing it early, while at the same time having a mobile phone in his pocketable to detect a song and its artist just by listening to it.
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Veil of Silence
​C Minus for Patient Monitoring
Our decades’ old culture of threshold monitoring has created its own worldwide infrastructure of monitoring scientists, industrial designers, standards committees, and marketing teams. Make no mistake about it. This is very much about big business.
Bacinol
Chance Discovery of a Magic Bullet
A chance event in a London laboratory in 1928 changed the course of medicine. Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist at St. Mary’s Hospital, had returned from a vacation when, while talking to a colleague, he noticed a zone around an invading fungus on an agar plate in which the bacteria did not grow.
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​Improving Opioid Prescribing 
​Employing Technology
In the management of chronic noncancer pain, telehealth has included telemedicine, Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy, and more recently smart phone applications.
Fake Medications
Contributing to the Problem
The lack of an international “fake” drug treaty, the lack of laws to pursue the counterfeiters of drugs (with these laws in place for other intellectual property infringements), have now led to the expansion of counterfeiting to all therapeutic fields including expensive cancer medicines.
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​Abuse Deterrent Opioids 
​Painkillers that Deter Abuse
Prescription opioid misuse and abuse is a serious and pervasive public health crisis. Creating abuse-deterrent opioid formulations may be an important step in combating opioid abuse.
Improving Opioid Prescribing 
​Turning to Practice Guidelines
Patients with chronic pain tend to be complex, and commonly have multiple medical and psychiatric comorbidities, including mood and anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance use disorders.
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Smartphones
Impact on Healthcare
Medication adherence is a problem amongst patients with chronic conditions and technology can play an important role.
Redesigning Opioids
History of Opioids
The perfect opioid would be one that delivers optimal therapeutic benefit and optimal abuse deterrence. It might be possible to discover opioid drugs that have less abuse liability or that are designed in a formulation that is more resistant to abuse.
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Photographing Patients 
​Standards, Practice, & Legislation
It is essential that policymakers, health care practitioners, and administrators become familiar with ethical regulations and guidelines related to digital images.
Opioid Addicts and Surgery 
​Anesthesia Concerns
The impact of addiction in surgery is multifaceted and dynamic. Awareness about the growing problem of drug abuse and its evils must be created both among the anesthesiologist and the patients.
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Fake Meds 
​​Regulations Addressing the Problem
The Medicrime Convention was drafted by the Council of Europe in 2010 to include an international standard for criminalizing the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit medicines.
Ventilators
Role of Nurses
Should nurses access patients only, or should they be allowed to make changes to mechanical ventilator settings as well? A mechanical ventilator is a positive or negative pressure breathing device that can maintain ventilation and oxygen delivery for a prolonged period.
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​Rural, Pregnant, & Addicted 
​Opioid Addiction in Pregnancy
Among women, the highest prevalence of opioid use occurs between the ages of 20 and 29 years. This is also the age group with the highest fertility rate.
Photographing Patients 
​Obtaining, Handling & Utilizing
There remains an inadequacy of health care facilities to develop and implement policies and guidelines relevant to digital patient photography.
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Counterfeit Medicines & Devices
Global Impact
​​Counterfeit drugs have the potential to escalate toward a macroeconomic pandemic.
​The Audacity of Dope
Untold Story of the Opioid Epidemic​​​
​​Between 2008 - 2013, more than 124,000 Americans died from prescription opioid and heroin overdoses. 
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Alcohol-based Handrubs
All are Not the Same 
Before deciding which alcohol-based hand rub preparation to install throughout your facility, it is very important to provide nurses and other healthcare personnel with the opportunity to evaluate alcohol-based hand rub products.
Smartphones
Challenges for Healthcare Apps
The mobile platform must be seamless and autonomous in its operation (e.g., in raising alerts), in order to provide a usable service to a target group that usually does not have any familiarity with technology and might even be unconscious during times of medical emergency.
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Smartphones
​Wireless Transformation of Healthcare
The latest generation of smartphones are increasingly viewed as handheld computers rather than as phones, due to their powerful on-board computing capability, capacious memories, large screens and open operating systems that encourage application development.
Smart Surgical Devices 
​Designing and Developing
For medical equipment the design client, procedure and product should be considered in order to gain a better understanding of specific design requirements.
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Monitoring on Patient Floors 
​Reliable Technology? 
In modern hospitals, sets of physiologic parameters (bio-markers) are sampled from patients either continuously or intermittently in order to monitor their clinical conditions for the occurrence of change regarded as dangerous.
Counterfeit Medicines & Devices
Scourge of Developing Countries
In developing countries counterfeit drugs treat malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV. In the developed world, the counterfeited drug is Viagra.
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​Blank Pills
Counterfeit Medicine Trafficking 
​Blank pills are counterfeit medications that are manufactured, distributed, and sold through criminal channels. According to the FDA 20% of all medications sold are blank pills.
Noise Pollution in the ICU
Look to the Staff for Help
A recent article in Critical Care reported on noise levels in five different ICUs and demonstrated average noise levels far above the World Health Organization recommended standard of 35 decibels (dB).
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Headphones For ICU Patients
Is there a Role for Music in the ICU?
The Society of Critical Care Medicine Guidelines for the Management of Pain, Agitation, and Delirium in the ICU recommend non-pharmacologic interventions, such as music, because they are opioid-sparing, low cost, easy to provide, and safe.
Alcohol-based Handrubs 
​Reduction in MRSA
“Hand Hygiene Australia” was launched in 2009 and two years later investigators documented a significant decline in national MRSA bacteremia rates.
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On April 17, 2003, I Died 
​Lifesaving Technologies
Matt Whitman, a retired Michigan state trooper, related his dramatic account of a hospitalization gone terribly wrong.  His neck surgery – precipitated by a collision with a drunk driver years earlier – had gone well, but in the recovery room, a new danger emerged.