Mark Lanier Visits From Medskool

Sunday, January 6th 2008
Health News • Vioxx • Law

As Overlawyered and Kevin, MD have linked to, someone claiming to be Mark Lanier has posted a comment concerning my criticism of the Vioxx litigation. Following that comment, other seeming Vioxx plaintiffs jumped into the debate.

I’ll hide my insecurity and not even try to argue concerning my typos,

Please be more precise in your practice of medicine than you are in your blogging! First off, I (Mark Lanier) was not the “defense attorney.” I was the “Plaintiffs’ attorney.”

Or apparent lack of empathy,

The guy who wrote this original article is an idiot. He is young, doesn’t care about other people…

You can certainly get a chuckle out of the flamboyant messages and the commenters’ complete lack of understanding of statistics by reading the comments as linked to above.

I will try to shed some light on whether Mark Lanier is wasting his time lurking on obscure medical blogs (From Medskool gets ~100 unique visitors a day and hosts a far from thriving debate on Vioxx litigation). The poster does use Mr. Lanier’s readily available public email address but the IP address logged takes us out to Avon, Colorado. Not New York or Los Angeles or Houston.

That doesn’t preclude it from actually being Mark Lanier, maybe he owns a ski cabin up there or something of the sort.

If it actually is him and Mr. Lanier visits the site again I welcome him to continue to comment.

In anycase, if you’re interested in reading some actual refutation of the claims made by Mark then (as always) head on over to Overlawyered’s post.

p.s.
Mark Lanier has now posted on Overlawyered. Also of note, some of the anti-Merck activist who have commented on From Medskool have also reposted their exact same comments on Overlawyered.

p.p.s.
Per Ted at Overlawyered the commenter on their site is actually Mark Lanier. I doubted it was actually him, so that is certainly interesting.