Update: NitroMed To Appear In “Conversations About Race-Based Medicine” Interview Series
As many of you know, I have been publishing a series of “conversations” with physicians, social scientists, and others about race and medicine on this blog. I have learned a lot from each of the people I have interviewed and am grateful for their participation in this special healthcare blogosphere event.
Over the next few weeks, I will be publishing the final four interviews in this series. I am very pleased to announce that Dr. Michael L. Sabolinski, NitroMed’s Chief Medical Officer, agreed to speak with me about BiDil, race and medicine recently.
This is especially gratifying as much as been made of the pharmaceutical industry’s unwillingness to engage the blogosphere. Readers should know that I didn’t pull any punches. I asked Dr. Sabolinski some very tough questions about NitroMed’s motivations for marketing BiDil to African Americans, its relations with the African American community and other subjects. He answered every question with candor and passion. I will publish my conversation with Dr. Sabolinski this May.
I also had the pleasure of interviewing three other distinguished individuals for this series. They are:
-Dr. Keith Ferdinand, Chief Science Officer of the Association of Black Cardiologists
-Dr. Esteban González Burchard, Assistant Professor, at the University of California, San Francisco
-Dr. Brian D. Smedley, Research Director and Co-Founder of Opportunity Agenda
Stay tuned to read these fascinating interviews.
Why Is No One Participating?
On another note, one of the reasons that I am holding this interview series is to spark conversation and debate within the healthcare blogosphere about this important topic. There are a lot of people out there writing passionately about price transparency, Health Savings Accounts, single-payer healthcare and other topics. Given the level of dialogue about these subjects, I expected to see a lot more comments from my fellow bloggers about this topic. Frankly, I’m surprised and disappointed that I have yet to receive one comment from readers on the interviews I have conducted thus far.
Hey, if NitroMed is unafraid to tackle these issues head on, should I expect any less from health policy wonks, physicians and others? These folks spent a lot of time talking to me about these issues. Please do them the favor of getting involved and providing feedback on these interviews.
To read previous interviews in this series, please click here.
