medicines

The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) has announced that it will ban homeopathy and herbal medicine in order to save £250 million ($325 million) a year, calling the healing methods a “misuse of scarce funds.” They are among dozens of medicines which officials said should not be funded by the health service. [1]
NHS has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on homeopathic treatment, which it now says “is a placebo” and a waste of money that could be spent on “treatments that work.”

In a report, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to review the safety and effectiveness of opioid painkillers. The panel of experts says monumental changes are needed to the way in which physicians treat pain, their patients cope with pain, and government and private insurers support individuals’ treatment for chronic pain. [1]

Congress will vote today on a nearly 1,000-page bill that holds drastic changes for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). If the bill is approved, it would speed up the approval of new drugs and medical devices. The House has been heavily criticized for allegedly rushing piece of legislation through without sufficient scrutiny. [1]
Source: National Center for Health Research

The World Health Organization (WHO) issued new guidelines for treating gonorrhea that reflect the looming threat posed by antibiotic resistance.
Under the U.N. health agency’s new directives, gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD), should no longer be treated with a class of antibiotics called quinolones, because quinolone-resistant strains of the disease have emerged all over the world. [1]

Drug companies don’t need to give doctors thousands of dollars in kickbacks to sway them to prescribe their medications and implant their devices. A new study published online in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that doctors who received a free meal from a pharmaceutical company were more likely to prescribe the drug the company was promoting than doctors who received no such meals.