Drug Recall Lawyer Blog

Not drug related, but Happy Anniversary is in order.

Now that you know more about me than you are probably comfortable with (who celebrates that?), let’s get to business with some noteworthy items:

• Reuters discusses the FDAs investigation of using drugs like Seroquel on children.
• Recently expanded indications for Seroquel by children.
• The Chicago Tribune writes about abuses in prescribing psychotropic medications without consent and without a valid medical reason. Note the front-and-center picture of Seroquel.
• The Wall Street Journal discusses a clinical study showing that an experimental once-a-week treatment woks better to treat type-2 diabetes than Januvia.
• Tomorrow (December 8, 2009) the FDA will convene a joint meeting of the Cardiovascular and Renal Drugs Committee and Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. They will discuss safety as it pertains to Gadolinium-based contrast agents, which are used before MRI procedures. A copy of the background material (agenda, briefing information and meeting roster) is located here. More information on Gadolinium-based contrast agents can be found at our blog and our website.
• More on Ghostwriting (courtesy Brian Ketterer). I like this excerpt:

If a professional writer is paid by a company to write a piece and a non-author doctor is asked to approve it, the appropriate outcome would be for the professional writer to be listed as the author and for the non-author doctor to be thanked in an acknowledgement for having reviewed the paper. If the non-author doctor makes substantial enough changes to the paper, he or she might be listed as a coauthor. In either case, the funding for the paper should be disclosed.

Happy Monday!

Gabriel Myers, age 7 and in the Florida foster care system, deliberately hanged and killed himself with a detachable shower hose.

My wife and I recently signed up for foster care here in Baltimore, and we have been taking care of our first foster care child (an infant) for the past 3 months. Foster care is the temporary placement of a child, typically while the parent gets his or her life together in order to better care for the child. As we went through the process, we met a lot of foster care parents, and learned that many children are placed in foster care because they are physically, emotionally or sexually abused; or because they are neglected. The older the children are when they are pulled away from their parents, the more likely it is that they have significant emotional and psychiatric injuries.

So, this is an issue I feel strongly about. Children taken away from a volatile situation need the best care possible, and need to be safe and loved. Recent reports from Florida show that many children who have had tumultuous lives are being put on psychotropic medication when they enter the foster care system. In fact, an astounding number of children in the Florida Department of Children and Families are on these drugs:

• 22% of children aged 6-12


• 33% of children aged 13-17

Tellingly, a fewer percentage of foster care children who live with relatives or family friends are taking psychotropics—about 12%. And, that number even feels high.

Continue reading "Foster Care Children and Off-Label Drug Use " »