Research Corruption

On March 12 of this year, the Los Angeles Daily News ran an article by Susan Abram titled: Doctors report big pharma payouts for drug endorsements. It discusses the financial ties between physicians and drug companies in California. Here are some quotes: "In fact, hundreds of physicians, psychiatrists, and medical school faculty members across California are on the payroll of major drug companies, earning tens of thousands of dollars for speaking to other medical professionals at events held by industry leaders that make drugs such as Advair, Cymbalta, Viagra and Zoloft." ...

BACKGROUND The primary purpose of the bio-psychiatric-pharma faction is to expand turf and sell more drugs. This is a multi-faceted endeavor, one component of which is disease mongering. This consists of using marketing techniques to persuade large numbers of people that they have an illness which needs to be treated with drugs. With regards to postpartum depression, it is an obvious fact that some mothers do indeed experience a measure of depression in the period after giving birth. The term postpartum depression has in the past been generally understood to mean that the problem had something to do with hormones. Today brain chemicals are blamed. ...

Alice Keys, MD, has recently written a short article for Mad in America. You can see it here. Dr. Keys points out that to maintain a medical license, one must accumulate continuing education credits, and that these credits have to be approved by state licensing boards. It’s widely known that pharmaceutical companies have largely hijacked this process in recent decades, and that their “educational” presentations might be better described as infomercials. ...

I’ve recently come across (courtesy of Tallaght Trialogue) an article in Current Psychiatry (Feb 2013) on this topic. The author is Henry A. Nasrallah, M.D., and you can see it here. Dr. Nasrallah, who is Editor-in-Chief of Current Psychiatry, states that there are 273 bio-markers for schizophrenia. But wait. Dr. Nasrallah goes on to say: "None of the individual 273 biomarkers alone can serve as a diagnostic tool for the schizophrenias because there will be high rates of false positives and false negatives." ...

Yesterday (February 28) the Lancet published a study called “Identification of risk loci with shared effects on five major psychiatric disorders: a genome-wide analysis." The study was conducted by the Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. The Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) was formed in 2007. Its purpose is “…to undertake meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for psychiatric disorders…” The authors state that they have no conflicts of interest. On their home page, the PGC state: ...

This post is a continuation of my post Steven Novella M.D. and Mental Illness Denial. In Mental Illness Denial Part I, Dr. Novella makes the point that various parts of the brain enable us to do certain things, and that if we are doing these things dysfunctionally, or not well, or perhaps not at all, then clearly there is something wrong with that part of the brain. The example he gives is the activity of paying attention – but I think this is provided as an example, and that Dr. Novella intended his comments to apply to the full range of problems embraced by the DSM. ...

Prior to about 1994, childhood bipolar disorder was virtually unheard of. DSM-III-R (1987), in the section on manic episode, states, “…studies indicate that the mean age at onset is in the early 20s. However…a sizable number of new cases appear after age 50.”(p 216) Of course a mean age of onset in the early 20’s could include young children. The section on major depressive episode, however, contains the following: “The average age of onset is in the late 20s, but a major depressive episode may begin at any age, including infancy.” (p 220) ...

At present the pharmaceutical companies are responsible for testing the effectiveness and safety of their own products. In recent years there have been numerous reports of dishonest practices in this area, including suppression of unfavorable results and massaging of data to create the impression that a drug is more effective than is actually the case. Recently, Christopher Lane publicized a particularly egregious example of this from England. The drug at the center of this scandal is reboxetine. It is not available in the US, but is widely prescribed in the UK and in sixty other countries for depression, panic disorder, and ADHD. ...