Disavow A Paxil Study Once And For All? Pharmalot By Ed Silverman August 7th, 2012 A decade ago, the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry published a paper concluding that the Paxil antidepressant, which is sold by GlaxoSmithKline, was “generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents” [here it […]
The DSM is a medical code book, a way of representing an illness as a symbol. With the coming of third party payers, there’s an added dimension – covered or not covered by insurance. With time, there came to be another dimension standardizing the specifics of that coverage. These latter dimensions are determined outside of […]
Hearing those sounds of silence coming from the DSM-5 Task Force? No further comment on or results from the Field Trials. No commentary from the principals. If you don’t follow Suzy Chapman’s blog [Dx Revision Watch], you might even forget that there’s a revision coming out in less than a year. And most of the […]
I left the Emory full-time faculty a few years before Dr. Nemeroff arrived on the scene, but remained on the clinical faculty to the present and practiced a mile away from the campus. Over the years, I heard and saw a lot of what happened as the department medicalized. But we didn’t see Dr. Nemeroff […]
I’ve spent a week or so living up to my nom de plume: psychopharmacological evangelism… psychopharmacological evangelism: “serendipitous clinical observation”… psychopharmacological evangelism: “the innovation crisis”… psychopharmacological evangelism: but “the pipeline really is empty”… psychopharmacological evangelism: alternative frames… psychopharmacological evangelism: paradox, illusion… psychopharmacological evangelism: inertia… It’s just the way I think out loud to clarify what […]
In the last post, I talked blithely about how Pharma had functioned as a sugar daddy to psychiatry in recent decades, and that’s frankly how many of us have come to see it. I can conceive of partnerships between academia and industry that might not become cesspools of stealth advertising and scientific corruption like the […]
The now famous empty pipeline has been an on again, off again topic for years, but I first knew that the pharmaceutical companies were pulling out of CNS Drug development last summer when there were waves of commentary on the topic [see psychopharmacological evangelism…]. By this Spring, the American Psychiatric Foundation assembled a Pipeline Summit […]
I suppose my conclusion that "the pipeline really is empty" [psychopharmacological evangelism: but “the pipeline really is empty”…] might sound like a simple affirmation of the obvious, but that’s not how I see it. Dr. Insel‘s idea is that it’s empty because there are concrete obstacles [like government regulations, or costs, or pharmascolds, or who-knows-what] […]
Two recent articles reviewed here give quite different versions of the cost of drug development. The relevant clips from both articles are reproduced below with their divergent estimates. One or both might be grossly distorted, but they can’t both be right. It matters because one of the estimates is being used by the Director of […]