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Archive for May, 2015

let’s pretend…

( OPINION )

I’ve mentioned this before, but it won’t seem to go away. When I opened the program guide for the 2015 APA Convention, this immediately caught my eye: If you don’t know or recall what this is about, I’d suggest reading yellow brick roads… where I first met the NNCI [on Friday the 13th in March […]

Amen…

( OPINION )

Minnesota Finally Rejects Managed Care Real Psychiatry by George Dawson May 29, 2015 This report from George Dawson and what just happened there is breath of fresh air in a time when psychiatry and Mental Health could use one. This situation in Minnesota is similar to that throughout the country, and it looks as if […]

psychiatry thinks…

( OPINION )

According to Jean Piaget, the ability to create and use categories, to classify things, is a developmental achievement that antedates the ability to think abstractly – characterizing the period roughly spanning the Elementary School years. And categorical thinking remains an essential tool throughout the life cycle. In his landmark book, The Nature of Prejudice, Psychologist […]

a study worth looking into…

( OPINION )

This is a released-on-line version of a new meta-analysis of SSRIs in pediatric depression. Be warned that I’m not going to try to vet all their analytic techniques [as they do some pretty heady mathematical pyrotechnics to derive their various curves]. I’ll just say that in-so-far-as I understood it, it appeared legit to me. They […]

unserious arguments seriously…

( OPINION )

This is my own sixth blog on the recent NEJM series in just over a week [a contrarian frame of mind… , wtf?…, wtf? for real…, a narrative…, and not so proud…]. The Drazen/Rosenbaum pieces may well be on the way to being the most-blogged journal articles since Paxil Study 329 – a rite of […]

beyond the borders…

( OPINION )

If you follow these things, you’ve already read this NYT Op-Ed. But I’m still going to post it in toto as a testimony to people like Carl [and Mike and Mary and Leigh] who will persevere against any kind of gradient they meet until the job gets done. They intuitively knew that what happened to […]

not so proud…

( OPINION )

This is a follow-up to the last post [a narrative…]. I wrote Dr. Angell who pointed me to this editorial in the NEJM: The Journal and Its Owner — Resolving the Crisis by Marcia Angell The New England Journal of Medicine. 1999 341:752. This week I succeed Jerome P. Kassirer as editor-in-chief of the Journal. […]

a narrative…

( OPINION )

In  wtf? for real… I was criticizing the editorial by Editor Jeffrey Drazen [Revisiting the Commercial–Academic Interface] and series by reporter Lisa Rosenbaum [Reconnecting the Dots — Reinterpreting Industry–Physician Relations, Understanding Bias — The Case for Careful Study, Beyond Moral Outrage — Weighing the Trade-Offs of COI Regulation] in the New England Journal of Medicine […]

wtf? for real…

( OPINION )

see also: No, Pharmascolds Are Not Worse Than The Pervasive Conflicts Of Interest They Criticize Criticism of NEJM’s defense of industry-physician relations Responding to parts 2-3 of New England Journal of Medicine’s series on pharma-MD relations In my Internal Medicine days, I read the New England Journal of Medicine from cover to cover every single […]

wtf?…

( OPINION )

I know when I run into a blog post like this one that references no less than five articles without summaries, I frown because the author is implying that I should read all five of them. And that is what I’m implying. I’ve listed them chronologically as they’ve appeared, but you might do better to […]