Roger Bate, author of the new book, “Phake: The Deadly World of Falsified and Substandard Medicines,” has found some incredibly realistic -- and deadly -- fake medicines. Which are real and which are phony? See if you can tell the difference.

Patients who take a close look at medical science in search of treatments are often appalled by what they discover. On the one hand, there's academic research, a self-contained and self-absorbed universe of its own where data may be internally consistent (on a good day) and robustly reproducible, yet often has little relevance to real-world clinical conditions.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar Scott Gottlieb, MD a former senior adviser to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) warns that a new ruling by CMS will force people to get open-heart surgeries that might have been avoidable.

In a just-published op-ed in the New York Times, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) international health economist Roger Bate highlights a better way to fight fake pharmaceuticals while still giving poor Americans access to less costly drugs from online pharmacies.

Knowing where all our ingredients come from is the first step toward improving drug quality.

Today, URL Pharma was acquired by Takeda for nearly $800M.  The story here in brief is that for hundreds of years, colchicine was used for the treatment of gout and other conditions; it was an effective drug but had to be used carefully. URL invested in the formulation development and clinical studies required for colchicine, and ultimately received FDA approval in 2009. 

While it may be harmful and disingenuous to insist upon a single algorithm or best approach to practicing medicine, it could be helpful to at least provide clear guidance so that physicians would know to avoid certain therapeutic approaches.

While adding “in bed” may make bland comments amusing, adding “like Steve Jobs” doesn’t make dumb ideas interesting or executable.

By keeping the focus on better health for real people, perhaps we’ll develop both the humility to recognize how little we still understand as well as the drive to ensure — and emphatically demand — that our advances ultimately wind up not only in papers, but also in patients.