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Archive for July, 2011

cry foul…

What an important voice Carl Elliott has become… Useless Studies, Real Harm New York Times By CARL ELLIOTT July 28, 2011 LAST month, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a scathing reassessment of a 12-year-old research study of Neurontin, a seizure drug made by Pfizer. The study, which had included more than 2,700 subjects and […]

speaking of about time…

Drug firms paid ‘independent’ experts Practice led to AG-whistleblower lawsuitKXAN – Austin Texas by Nanci Wilson 26 Jul 2011 Doctors working in state hospitals and community mental health centers began switching patients to the atypical antipsychotics because they were deemed the best treatment by an expert panel convened by the Texas Department of Mental Health […]

about time…

Mommy, Am I Really Bipolar? Newsweek by Stuart L. Kaplan, M.D. June 19, 2011 In the autumn of 1994, a novel idea was afoot in my profession. At the annual conference of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, I attended a workshop on bipolar disorder in children. About 10 of us attended the […]

swallow hard…

So this morning we left Oahu for Maui and I grabbed a copy of the Honolulu Star Advertiser and there was an article – "Patients and Taxpayers will enjoy big savings as drug patents expire." It had a table with some of the drugs we’ve all been talking about: Drug Patent Ends Made By: Zyprexa […]

tuning the quartet…

In the course of a long education, there’s an occasional lecture that stands out – sticks in the memory for decades. One of the ones that stuck for me was a statistics lecture in early medical school. Statistics was a minor course, mostly in the curriculum to teach us to read the literature in an […]

a magnificent omission…

A few months back when I was retracing the TMAP story, I was horrified at all the "Guidelines" and "Algorithms" for treatment in Psychiatry. I scoured the Internet looking for ones that were free of conflict of interest contamination, and found nothing – nothing. When I recently ran across the Guidelines for the Treatment of […]

and…

…so 1boringoldman and 1notsoboringoldwoman are off on Thursday [until August 5th] to an undisclosed remote location [with Internet connectivity, laptop, and iPhones in tow]. be well…

go pogo…

It’s an absurd paper, long forgotten – just another one of those CV fillers that were so common ten years ago in the psychiatric literature, and it’s authored by the now infamous Dr. Nemeroff when he was the "boss of bosses." In the scope of things – meaningless drivel… Double-blind, placebo-controlled comparison of imipramine and […]

trial 93: a very very bad penny…

But if you think about it, what does the result of a Risperidone Trial in disruptive retarded kids have to do with bipolar disorder in children, even if it had shown what they claimed [which it didn’t]? Stay tuned… My layman’s reading of the clinical trial results of the Risperdal trials in children can be […]

trial 93: a very bad penny…

I had assumed that the version of the Biederman documents I was using was all that was available. That was wrong as EP pointed out. psychrights had the complete release. When I located it before, I thought it was ‘broken,’ not realizing that it was just a huge file that took its time traveling to […]