medlatest Editorial

Our weekly review of the workings of medtech industry resist the temptation to focus on the negatives. We’re only human after all. And who knows, so might be some of the contents of British beefburgers for all we know.

In the title of this week’s piece we ask whether patients will ever be specifiying the devices that will be used on them. We rather hope they won’t, but then again a bit more information wouldn’t go amiss. After all, who’s body is it?

We’ve covered many stories this week, but here are the highlights.

Medlatest you can listen to…every week. OK it’s not Monty Python, but we hope it brings a slightly new angle to the dry old world of medical device technology.

The need for a more solid evidence-basis is an increasing one in medtech, and rightly so, companies and their reps having got away with unsubstantiated claims for too long. So are things changing or is it just the regulators who are raising the bar?

In a Monday morning mood to challenge everything that gets touted as evidence, we have a bit of a nibble at research claims that articular cartilage degeneration can be reversed with a hydrogel infill.

Medlatest’s weekly editorial gets the year off to a bang with its healthily cynical assessment of why medical device technology isn’t always delivering for us patients. Then we decide maybe it is!

Gun control doesn’t often feature on our pages, but come on people, this is the 21st century. How many more kids will it take to convince people of the insanity of the right to bear arms.

Medical Device innovation per se is under our spotlight this week as we get a bit “end of yeary” about what’s been occurring in the industry.

Renal Denervation: If you’ve not heard the phrase before, get used to it, because the therapy has so many potentially interesting applications with very promising outcomes thus far, it’ll soon be mainstream. A new article ponders the complicated intellectual property position.

Medical Device companies would never suppress bad news relating to their products would they? Well, of course they would, but we have evidence that actually they’re a pretty ethical bunch under the hard commercial surface.

Another week of nothing happening in medtech…. absolutely nothing of note, apart from advances in heart valves, lung transplantation, coronary artery interventions, pacemaker/defibrillators. A boringly average week then, which is really quite awesome when you think about it.

OK so it’s Thanksgiving for those of you on the other side of the pond. No excuses over here though for removing our noses from the grindstone, albeit we’ve taken the opportunity of a bit of festive levity to have a light-hearted look at how companies name their products… and themselves.

We recently covered a new campaign being run by the British Medical Association (BMA) which draw attention to the appalling working conditions endured by workers in the medical device manufacturing sector in some countries.

We close pretty much every week feeling slightly frustrated that the world we live in, that of the observer of medical device companies, technologies and medical professionals, is not perfect. Trouble is the environment and its players don’t do much to improve things sometimes.

Wouldn’t you love to be fly on the wall at ST.Jude’s exec offices when they see an analyst talking knowledgeably about molecules with the obvious consequence that Durata’s lead coating gets questioned… again. Despite sound clinical data, it seems they just can’t win as the nay sayers dig up anything to raise the spectre of potential disaster.