March « 2009 « CitizenVox

Archive for March, 2009

March27

RealAge redux

By:

elderly

Ok, so I broke down and took Hearst’s RealAge test for research purposes. But I’m pretty sure the results are stuck in Public Citizen‘s spam filter. The gist of it is that you take RealAge’s online quiz about your health history and habits, and it cranks out your “real” age for you, plus or minus a few years. Predictably, couch potatoes and bacon eaters have years subtracted, while folks with clean medical histories have years added.

And then RealAge sells your info and email to pharmaceutical companies, as the New York Times reported yesterday. Our friends at the CL&P blog have a great post on this, questioning the legality of this business model.

Anyway, RealAge’s questionnaire is unremarkable.

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Posted in: Health, Pharmaceuticals0 comments

March26

Pay no attention to the corporation behind the curtain!

By:

big-pharma

The New York Times’ Stephanie Clifford had an interesting piece today about RealAge, an online quiz site that apparently has garnered a fair amount of press from Oprah etc. Public Citizen’s Peter Lurie, deputy director of health research, weighs in by telling the Times how sites like this take advantage of consumers’ health fears:

“Literally millions of people have unknowingly signed up,” said Peter Lurie, M.D., the deputy director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, a public interest group in Washington. The company, he said, “can create a group of people, and hit them up and create anxiety even though the person does not have a diagnosis.”

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Posted in: Ethics, Health, Pharmaceuticals1 comments

March17

Tell AIG what you think!

By:

When news broke that insurance giant AIG planned to dole out more than $165million in bonuses to company executives, Public Citizen was outraged.

We immediately got to work determining how to respond. We developed a plan – and we need you to take action today.

Tomorrow, AIG CEO, Edward M. Liddy, will testify before a House subcommittee examining how AIG got into its current economic mess and why it needs so much taxpayer bailout money.

It’s time to put an end to this era of irresponsible behavior and wasteful spending. The fact that companies like AIG are taking taxpayer money – YOUR money – while handing out millions of dollars in bonuses to people who oversaw the company’s downfall is an outrage.

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Posted in: Activism, Congress4 comments

March16

Paging Dr. Wolfe

By: Editor

joansid2

We stumbled on this recent interview with Dr. Sidney Wolfe, the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and our acting president (pictured at left with our former president, the indefatigable Joan Claybrook), in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Over the course of a brief conversation with Alan Cassels, Dr. Wolfe rebuts a number of big pharma talking points.

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Posted in: Activism, Health, Pharmaceuticals0 comments

March6

Public Citizen wins again!

By:

Public Citizen has exciting news to share. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court in Wyeth v. Levine agreed with Public Citizen that patients harmed by defective and mislabeled drugs have the right to sue drug companies to recover compensation for their injuries.

This is a huge win not only for Public Citizen – who was part of the plaintiff’s legal team – but for all American citizens.

Drug companies aren’t perfect, and sometimes they fail to identify and inform doctors and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of problems with their products or their products’ labels.

And, most important, once a drug is marketed to thousands of people, we learn about things that we never knew in the clinical trials for that drug – problems that arise over the years as doctors prescribe and patients take the drug.

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Posted in: Consumer Protection, Litigation, Uncategorized0 comments