Passing the Editorial Baton for Worst Pills, Best Pills News and WorstPills.org

This will be the last issue of our newsletter for which I will be the editor.

Following the publication of the first and second editions of our best-selling book, Worst Pills, Best Pills, in 1988 and 1993, readers began to ask us for more frequent updates to such information. Our response was to start publishing Worst Pills, Best Pills News in 1995, now in its 20th year, followed by the launch of WorstPills.org in 2003. We continue to receive moving letters from many of you about how our drug-safety information has benefitted the health of you or your loved ones by helping you stay away from dangerous or ineffective drugs.

Like me, none of you should be at all concerned about the future of these publications under the able editorship of Dr. Michael Carome, now in his fourth year with Public Citizen’s Health Research Group and more than halfway through his first year as Director of the group. Mike’s training, as is mine, is in internal medicine. He completed a fellowship in nephrology after his residency and then went on to a position with the Walter Reed Army Medical Center Nephrology Service. Prior to starting his work at Public Citizen, he was a U.S. government expert on the ethics of clinical trials for more than a decade, working in the Office for Human Research Protections. Since joining the Health Research Group, he has testified before, or prepared testimony for, 13 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee meetings concerning prescription drug safety. He has written 23 articles for Worst Pills, Best Pills News and has been exemplary in editing reports and articles on a variety of topics. He has clearly become an expert on issues of drug and medical device safety, pharmacy compounding, and FDA oversight.

As for me, my title since June has been Founder and Senior Adviser of the Health Research Group. Despite (or more likely, because of) serving here for more than 42 years, I am fortunately in very good health and still working full-time. I plan to continue writing articles for Worst Pills, Best Pills News and researching drug-safety issues that might require a ban of or warning on a drug. Last summer, I also began writing a regular column for the esteemed British Medical Journal. With the permission of the journal, we have started reprinting some of these columns in Worst Pills, Best Pills News, the first two having just appeared in the December 2013 and January 2014 issues. The third, regarding escalating criminal activity by multinational pharmaceutical companies, will appear in these pages next month.

Mike Carome and I have had an excellent working relationship while he has been here. We have learned a lot from one another, and we will continue to do so.