Dr. David Healy has just published the fourth installment [4/6] of his series on clinical trials: Not So Bad Pharma – March 28 April Fool in Harlow: Anecdote Fishing in Harlow – April 1 The Tragedy of Lou Lasagna – April 9 The Empire of Humbug: Bad Pharma – April 15 Most of us are […]
Letter to a Foreign Psychiatrist Psychiatric Times By Seyyed Nassir Ghaemi April 11, 2013 I write to you as an American who was once not an American. Of course, all Americans, at one time, were not Americans, but there is still a prototype: the Christian American of European descent. I’m not in that majority, so […]
Does DSM-5 Have a Captive Audience? Huffington Post by Allen Frances 04/14/2013 DSM-5 sells at a price gouging $200 per copy. The American Psychiatric Association has assumed that it has a fully captive audience of people who will feel compelled to buy DSM-5 for coding and reimbursement purposes – even if they don’t like its […]
Looking through the Preliminary Program for the American Psychiatric Association meeting in San Francisco next month was not exactly a trip down memory lane for me, though it reminded me of a former time. There was a time when I would look over such a program with excitement about what sessions I might go to. […]
Is it just me, or is everyone having trouble finding Pharmalot? Note: Annonymous to the rescue. I had to delete all of my cookies and the cache, and now it works. I’ve lost my cookies, and I don’t even miss them! Thanks…
[click image for link] Scanning through the preliminary program for next month’s APA Convention in San Francisco, I ran across the Presidential Symposium above. One doesn’t have to ponder very long to figure out who is the target of was the stimulus for this symposium – Dr. Allen Frances and some others of us who […]
Talking Rock Creek nearby was so named by the Cherokee because the rocky bed creates so much turbulence in places that the stream itself seems to be speaking simultaneously in multiple tongues. When I first encountered it, I thought of the many stories that make one up a single person’s narrative, all playing at the […]
New Views into the Brain NIMH Director’s Blog By Thomas Insel April 10, 2013 … This week marks the publication of a new tool that may alter the way we look at the brain. Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University have developed a method they call CLARITY. Yes, CLARITY is an acronym, for […]
Big Pharma Pockets $711 Billion in Profits by Robbing Seniors, Taxpayers Huffington Post by Ethan Rome 04/08/2013 Here’s an outrage that must be changed: Big Pharma has been systematically price-gouging the Medicare program for seniors and people with disabilities – and raking in billions in excessive profits. The 11 largest global drug companies made an […]
The Double Blind Randomized Placebo Controlled Clinical Trial [RTC] is such a standard methodology that it’s hard to realize that it even had an origin – more like something that came to us as the glaciers receded. But that’s not even close. It came to us in that era of bomb shelters, hula-hoops, hot-rods, and […]