Modern Healthcare, January 22, 2014. “With new drugs, there is often an exaggeration of the benefits and underreporting of the risks,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, who has testified at several hearings on drug safety. “There’s so much emphasis on drugs being the latest, the most innovative and novel—but unfortunately this usually means it’s just new, not necessarily better.”
December 2013. When Eddie Creed died at the Veterans Affairs hospital on Beacon Hill last year, his death certificate said throat cancer had killed him. But a KUOW investigation reveals what his doctors knew: A medical device called an Infusomat, which had been recalled the month before, ended his life. “Sadly, we actually have much more access to information about defective toasters, and certainly defective cars, than we seem to about defective medical devices,” said Diana Zuckerman, who heads the National Research Center for Women and Families in Washington, D.C.
Huffington Post. October 2, 2013. What the government shutdown and Obamacare really all about?
New York Times. September 9, 2013. It is fairly well known that reports made to the F.D.A. represent only “the tip of the iceberg” of surgical complications and adverse drug reactions, said Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families and an expert on the safety of medical devices.
The Post article on the overdiagnosis of cancer clearly reported the need to reduce patients’ fear and confusion about “cancers” that many experts now agree are not really cancer, because they don’t spread and aren’t harmful. The major obstacle has been uncertainty about how likely these conditions are to predict cancer or change into an invasive cancer in the future.
June 2013. Should FDA Advisory Committee members be allowed to have financial conflicts of interest regarding the approval of medical products? Diana Zuckerman discusses how financial ties to pharmaceutical companies can influence the voting and discussion on drug and medical device approvals, and how misunderstandings of statistics and the value of clinical trials can lead to the approval of dangerous products.