BC’s Provincial Health Officer Dr Perry Kendall announced in August that BC will be adopting a policy mandating flu shots for health care workers. Or they have to wear masks. This is likely the most aggressive flu prevention policy in Canada, one which could set the trend for the rest of the country. But Dr [...]
Alan Cassels’s Blog Posts
Alan Cassels is a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria studying how clinical research and experience on pharmaceuticals is interpreted by policy-makers, prescribers and consumers. He is a frequent commentator in the media on consumer drug issues and produces stories for magazines, newspapers and the CBC Radio program IDEAS. Alan is the author of Seeking Sickness: Medicals Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease and is also co-author, with Ray Moynihan of Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients, (Greystone Books, 2005). Much of his writing and research centres around an overdiagnosed, overtreated, and often overdrugged culture of medicine.
Will a flu shot keep you healthy? (hint: probably not)
October 2nd, 2012 · Alan Cassels · 2 Comments · Health care
Tags: flu policies. influenza·health·health care·population health
The End of the H1N1 Pandemic
August 23rd, 2010 · Alan Cassels · 1 Comment · Health care
The world spent billions on medication and vaccine stockpiles because the World Health Organization cried wolf. If the WHO cannot cleanse its ties to the industrialists hungry for profits in exaggerating the severity of disease in order to sell treatments, why should we ever again listen to anything they say?
Tags: health care costs
Cholesterol drugs don’t help the healthy
August 12th, 2010 · Alan Cassels · 1 Comment · Health care
I have said this before and this recent research begs me to say this again: Someday we will look back on society’s zeal for checking and chemically altering our blood cholesterol in the same way we now regard blood letting and purging: A medical barbarity that good science cannot support.
Tags: health care costs
