Top 49 entries.

My practice group and I have a policy of taking no free samples (indeed, not accepting visits from pharmaceutical representatives). From time to time I have toyed with the idea of receiving samples and creating a stockpile expressly for the indigent, but it still serves the interests of Big Pharma, facilitating the creation of a new customer they hope will remain a captive audience when their physician can no longer provide the medication for free. And, because samples are of the latest greatest medications, they are also the most expensive. We do a service for our patients when we resist the hype about the newest drugs, which are usually no better than old standby agents available generically or at least priced much more reasonably. This is true regardless of the patient’s prescription drug insurance or their ability to afford expensive medications.

Your responsibility as a patient is to question your prescriber’s reasoning in prescribing the latest and greatest rather than an old standby. S/he ought to be able to explain convincingly why the newer (more expensive) medication is worth the extra cost; otherwise, tell them the responsible thing to do would be to prescribe the medication that is less profitable for the manufacturer.

From (//STATiC). I don’t know by whose criteria these are “best”, but there are some incredible, arresting and disturbing images here.

Replication of a famous Stanley Milgrim experiment in social psychology, which turned out to be far harder for the investigators than the subjects. (New York Times )