Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14503
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Goozner M.
Support the Therapeutics Initiative!
GoozNews.com 2008 Oct 10
http://www.gooznews.com/archives/001217.html
Full text:
Our Canadian friends who’ve been on the forefront of the movement to provide basic information about the best uses of prescription drugs need help.
The Therapeutics Initiative was established in 1994 by the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics in cooperation with the Department of Family Practice at The University of British Columbia. It provides health care providers and patients with evidence-based information on drug therapy. TI is an independent organization, at arm’s length from government, the pharmaceutical industry and other vested interest groups. The Therapeutics Initiative is funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Health through a grant to the University of British Columbia.
Recently, the BC Ministry of Health convened a task force to examine the process by which the provincial government agrees to cover medications through its Pharmacare program (see this background article on Pharmalot). One of the report’s recommendations is to scrap the Therapeutics Initiative because of its “resistance to meaningful stakeholder input.”
Um, the independence of TI from “stakeholders” such as the pharmaceutical industry, payers and patient advocacy groups is exactly, in my view, what makes it valuable. (The task force, on the other hand, has been criticized on the grounds that five of nine task force members have ties to Big Pharma.
Among other things, TI took a cautious stance toward refocoxib (Vioxx) and rosiglitazone (Avandia). Both were later linked to an increased risk of heart attacks.
A source tells us the provincial government recently announced that a review of the Therapeutics Initiative would be conducted at the University of British Columbia October 30 and 31, 2008. Bassam Masri, chairman of the Department of Orthopedics at UBC, will serve as chair of the review committee and the external reviewers will be David Henry, President and CEO of the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Lisa Dolovich of the Centre for Evaluation of Medicines at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton, and Jean Gray of the Department of Pharmacology at Dalhousie University.
Our sources in the international medical community tell us that a letter of support for continued funding for TI is being circulated and will be sent to Dr. Masri. Supporters of TI can write Dr. Masri at the following address:
Bassam A. Masri, M.D.
Gordon & Leslie Diamond Health Care Centre
3rd Floor, 2775 Laurel Street
Vancouver, BC V5Z 1M9
Canada
bas.masri@vch.ca
