There’s something nice about getting back into the routine a little later than the others, I admit. But here I am back after three weeks of rest. I hope your landing is gentle and bearable. I’m happy with mine, so let’s go with what the week left us.
Not so long ago, news broke in August and we journalists had to rack our brains to keep reporting. But that’s ancient history now. The Ministry of Health has put out for public consultation a royal decree that went unnoticed in the middle of the holiday season. It is a standard that regulates the assessment of health technologies, ranging from a surgical procedure to a drug. When it is approved, if it ends up being validated by Congress, the developers of these technologies, that is, the laboratories in the case of drugs, will have to put on paper how much their development cost them: research, production and manufacturing. Here I tell you in more detail.
This may seem like an obvious responsibility, but it is not. The negotiations on medicines that take place in the offices of the Ministry of Health and the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS) are still very opaque. The ministerial teams have so far preferred to preserve secrecy, arguing that “breaking confidentiality” would imply a “loss of negotiating capacity and price competitiveness”, and therefore a “harm to the public interest”.
The No es Sano platform, formed by various organizations such as Salud por Derecho or the Association for Fair Access to Medicines, has been demanding more transparency from institutions and companies for years, as a shield that would prevent the latter’s profits from skyrocketing. Without paying much attention to it, that’s how things are.
We just had a recent example of a widely used drug, an anticoagulant, that we could buy at a much lower price. But the Provincial Court of Barcelona has banned the Teva laboratory from selling the generic Apixaban (that’s the trade name) because it considers, in the middle of a war between pharmaceutical companies, that another company has the right to keep the patent. A lower court had said the opposite a few months earlier. He recounted it in great detail in this article El País colleague – and healthy competition😌 – Oriol Güell.
It seems that this new team at the Ministry of Health wants to start changing things. At least they have declared these intentions and this royal decree is a first step. But there is still a lot of fabric to cut.
What happened in the summer
I’m picking up here, going a little off the usual script, some interesting topics that we published while this newsletter was on vacation. In case you missed them and would like to get them back.
- Women are also addicted to alcohol.but there are no gender-specific programs, which hinders access and delays recovery. A touch of attention.
- Any plans for Friday night? Get a scanner. I promise you this is not a joke. There are communities that meet at 2am.
- Are we facing the end of pesocentrism in consultations? We talk with professionals who propose going beyond the Body Mass Index (BMI) and This is the result.
Are too many menisci operated on?
You’ve probably torn your meniscus, or your mother, or your cousin, or your friend. It’s a fairly common occurrence when playing sports. However, scientific evidence questions the need for tear surgery in middle-aged and elderly people, as there is no clear benefit after a long-term operation. The phenomenon is called “medical reversal” in scientific jargon, and refers to when new evidence contradicts widely accepted and used medical practices. A swampy terrain, wow.
Spanish doctors Julio Doménech and Salvador Peiró wanted to know if these new studies had made their way to Spain and analyzed the interventions between 2009 and 2018. To their surprise, the answer was no. The results were published in a major journal. The full story is at this link.
Predicting whether therapy will work
Immunotherapy is one of the most promising therapies for treating cancer. However, it only works in a small percentage of patients (between 20 and 40%).
Scientists have been trying for some time to understand why this happens and if there are independent factors that explain it. Research from the Barcelona Institute of Biomedical Research, published in the journal “Nature Genetics”, has discovered five circumstances that can better predict the outcome of these therapies, based on the attack of the patient’s immune system against tumor cells. In this article I explain it in the simplest way possible. It’s very interesting.
Before I finish, I don’t want to leave anything out. Last year, 3,952 people committed suicide in Spain, according to provisional data from the National Institute of Statistics. But yesOnly 23% of the deceased had been treated by a mental health specialist. The information was given this week by the Secretary of State for Justice, Manuel Olmedo, and reveals that these people have gone unnoticed in the system. Either the system has not arrived in time. Or they have not received the specialization they needed.
Thank you for reading to the end and joining me for an additional lesson. I would love to hear from you what you would like to find in this newsletter as we begin September with renewed ideas and energy.
Have a nice weekend and well done! 🫀
