Some of the more important learning in medicine doesn’t come from medical school, or residency, or even sitting at the feet of the masters. It comes from reflecting on the long days seeing patients – what kind of things keep coming up over and over? Early on, it hadn’t occurred to me that my own […]
I so rarely disagree with anything Ed Silverman of Pharmalot has to say, I relish the opportunity to disagree with him for a change. When I read that the AMA had voted to call for a ban on Direct-to-Consumer [DTC] ads on TV [doctor power…], I felt almost giddy about my fellow physicians finally making […]
In the last post [creative funding III & some other things…], I mentioned a 2009 Meta-analysis of antidepressant augmentation using Atypical Antipsychotics and I wanted to say some more about it: Atypical Antipsychotic Augmentation in Major Depressive Disorder: A Meta-Analysis of Placebo-Controlled Randomized Trials by J. Craig Nelson, M.D. and George I. Papakostas, M.D. American […]
I know creative funding I… and creative funding II… were probably as tedious to read as they were to write, but since they were not available on-line, I felt like I had to say what they were in order to talk about them. I’ve sort of slacked off of vetting Clinical Trials for a while. […]
Extended-Release Guanfacine for Hyperactivity in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder by Lawrence Scahill, M.S.N., Ph.D., James T. McCracken, M.D., Bryan H. King, M.D., Carol Rockhill, M.D., Bhavik Shah, M.D., Laura Politte, M.D., Roy Sanders, M.D., Mendy Minjarez, Ph.D., Jennifer Cowen, Ph.D., Jennifer Mullett, R.N., Chris Page, B.S., Denise Ward, M.A., Yanhong Deng, M.P.H., Sandra Loo, […]
Back then, I was just four days old, so of course I didn’t understand. But now aged 74 years? I still don’t – either the then version or the now version…
Pfizer’s Geodon® [Ziprasidone] was the fifth Atypical Anipsychotic approved [2001]. The Orange Book lists its patent exclusivity through 2019, though it appears that generics have been approved since 2012 that are now available [see current costs] [I’ve given up trying parse patent/exclusivity information, so that’s all I know]. Independent of that confusion, there’s a Clinical […]
Unrepentant and brash, Martin Shkreli defends Daraprim pricing Martin Shkreli remains as unrepentant as ever Pharmalot December 3, 2015 In a brief, but illuminating appearance at a health industry gathering on Thursday, the controversial chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals rejected fresh criticism that he went back on his promise to lower the price of the […]
The pre-DSM-III version of psychiatry was fine with me. My internal medicine and research training had been heavily weighted on the objective side. But practicing, I had realized that the subjective experience of illness [and life] was a much more important part of things than I had realized. So the mix of objectivity and subjectivity […]
Occam’s razor, also known as Ockham’s razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae [the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness], is a principle that generally recommends selecting from among competing hypotheses the one that makes the fewest new assumptions. The strict translation is "Plurality is not to be posited without necessity." In a […]