The improvements in outcomes were striking. Patients with colorectal cancer who regularly used aspirin before and after a diagnosis were almost one-third less likely to die of the disease than non-users. Patients who initiated aspirin use only after a diagnosis did even better and had half the risk of dying from the cancer, possibly because of differences in their tumors. The patients were all being treated for nonmetastatic, or localized, cancers, and were followed for almost 12 years on average.

Unfortunately, I have an elevated risk of this type of cancer, so any news of this nature is good news. The first thing that came to mind on this is whether people with certain risk factors (inflammatory bowel disease, family history, history of polyps, and so on) might ever consider a daily regimen of low-dose aspirin, similar to what is sometimes recommended for people at risk for heart attack and stroke.

Of course, the doctors in the study make no such recommendations, and besides, aspirin can actually irritate the stomach and can cause ulcers or internal bleeding, which I would imagine to be very bad for someone with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis. Nonetheless, it’s a promising study, and will hopefully lead to additional research into potential treatments for colon cancer.

As PR Week points out, pharmaceutical companies have been buying “sponsored links” with search engines for years that show up when someone searches for a disease or medical condition. Usually the text descriptions of these links don’t or can’t give much information away, reading something like, “Learn about symptoms and treatments for (insert disease here).” Fair balance information, of course, would be included once someone clicked through the link.

In a somewhat confusing move, however, the FDA sent warning letters to many of the big players in the pharma space, claiming they failed to “provide the proper risk information.” This is an additional example showing that comprehensive rules for how pharma can legally participate online are long overdue:

But as more pharmaceutical companies become involved in social media, the FDA will have a responsibility to better define the regulatory parameters of the digital space, including paid keyword advertising, wikis, Twitter, and YouTube. Lacking a policy that detailed how to adopt these rules for the Web, companies followed the one click ad hoc system, which they’ve now been punished for and had taken off the table.

The fact that the FDA hasn’t adopted such rules isn’t fair to pharmaceutical companies, and isn’t helping patients, who may very well be missing out on valuable medical information they could use to educate themselves.

(Full disclosure: I work at Edelman, a PR firm, and do work on behalf of pharmaceutical clients.)

In a perfect world, I’d like to see most people paying for routine health expenses out-of-pocket from a health savings account, while keeping a catastrophic high-deductible insurance policy to cover accidents and major health crises. Consumers do have this option, but in the U.S., where most people get their health insurance through their employers, the traditional system isn’t going anywhere soon. Anything that gets people talking about possible solutions to our health care problems, however, is a good thing.

(The article comes via the WSJ Health Blog, which is one of my favorite reads on the Web. Not only are the posts themselves gold, but the comments sections bring in remarkably insightful comments from very intelligent people. It’s truly the blog that keeps on giving.)

This reputation comes, presumably, because drugs are expensive to create and manufacture, and those costs are passed along to the consumer – costs that can be prohibitively expensive if a patient is under-insured. However, getting a new drug to market costs nearly a billion dollars. The approval process almost requires every new product to be a blockbuster before it goes generic, and for every Viagra there are more products like Exubera (inhaled insulin) that fail to catch on and end up as major losses.

Pharma companies are also criticized for their marketing tactics, including employing reps that interact with physicians. Of course, politicians are getting in on the act by seeking to regulate these interactions between companies and physicians. As Paul H. Rubin points out, the authors of this proposed legislation seem to assume that there is something wrong with pharma companies marketing their products to the individuals charged with prescribing them. They also seem to think very little of physicians, who of course realize reps are selling a product, but also know they are an important resource:

Drug company reps offer overworked doctors useful, lifesaving information in an efficient manner. The drug companies are of course motivated by profit, but economists have known since Adam Smith that the profit motive is the best way to induce someone to do something useful.

I should offer a disclaimer: I currently do work for pharmaceutical companies. In the past I’ve worked at a non-profit organization dedicated to advocacy and education, and sponsorships from pharma companies enabled us to provide important health education and programs to individuals at no charge. I’ve worked at a hospital where physicians and educators relied on pharma reps to inform them about developments in the treatment of diseases.

No industry is completely free of problems, and the pharmaceutical industry has them. However, for an industry that has done as much to improve the human condition as pharma, the amount and scope of criticism they have received of late is undeserved.