The WaybackMachine is a remarkable thing. You enter a URL and it retrieves web-sites long since removed or updated. I put in http://www.psychguides.com/, the website of Expert Knowledge Systems from Rothman’s report, and found copies dating back as far as 1997 – the year after it was founded. The page from April 13, 1997 advertised […]
I am not an anti-psychiatrist. If anything, I’m the opposite – someone who is appalled at the misdirection that the specialty has taken. So I see the time I spend chasing down the kind of things I write about as my small attempt to get us on track. Psychiatrists are physicians who work to help […]
These days, we’re so inured to stories of payments to ‘KOLs’ and ghostwritten articles in psychiatry that new instances have become almost routine. There were, however, some variations on the theme in that Report in my last post that I found jarring. Dr. Allen Frances was Chairman of Psychiatry at Duke [1992-1998] and lead the […]
The whistle-blower suit filed against Johnson & Johnson by Allen Jones and the State of Texas was recently postponed until November, but some of the information from the case is publicly available at the Travis County, Texas courthouse. This post is from a Report I obtained through a contact in Austin who went to the […]
What did CATIE tell us that we didn’t already know? It came out in 2005, a month shy of the advertised five years from the approval of the grant. By that time, it was apparent to anyone who looked very hard that the Atypical Antipsychotics weren’t exactly the wonder drugs they were advertised to be, […]
al·go·rithm [al-guh-rith–uhm] –noun a finite number of steps, as for finding the greatest common divisor. algorithm definition A detailed sequence of actions to perform to accomplish some task. Named after the Iranian, Islamic mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and geographer, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi [780-850 AD]. Technically, an algorithm must reach a result after a finite number of […]
In my Internist days of the late 1960s, our antihypertensive drugs were much more toxic than the drugs used today – Reserpine, Aldomet, Apresoline. They often made people sick. Reserpine can regularly cause profound depressions, clinically indistinguishable from naturally occurring depression. Occasionally, people on Aldomet would develop Mania that looked for all the word like […]
Since I missed the Texas Medication Algorithm Project when it was in its prime, I started looking for remnants. Then I recalled that Phylis Vine had used The Wayback Machine to investigate the STI-site looking for Drs. Nemeroff’s and Schatzberg’s ghostwritten text, so I gave it a try. And TMAP is there from 2004 through […]
As with all the psychopharmacology blockbusters in the last twenty-five years, Risperdal [Janssen, Johnson & Johnson, Ortho-McNeil Janssen] was marketed deceptively. In the South Carolina penalty settlement the Judge noted that they had evidence that the manufacturer knew that Risperdal was associated with metabolic side-effects of some magnitude: I can find no evidence of the […]