Since I started this blog in 2006, 294 of my posts have the name "Plame" in them. It was Patrick Fitzgerald’s Investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. identity that got me started writing. Today, I finally saw "Fair Game," the recent movie with Naomi Watts and Sean Penn about those days. It was […]
"What’s in a name? That which we call a roseBy any other name would smell as sweet." Yesterday, there was a flurry of articles about a study that documented the extent of Industry ties of the doctors who wrote the Cardiology Guidelines – good articles every one. I might take some comfort in the fact […]
As a kid, I had something of a fixation on phrases. I remember musing on "old sayings." They sounded wise to me, and I wondered things like "how old do they have to be to qualify as ‘old sayings’?" or "if I can come up with one right now, how old will I be when […]
The best medical teacher I ever knew insisted on our focusing on what we didn’t know. "If you don’t tell me what you don’t know, how am I going to know what to teach you? or learn about if I don’t know either?" It was the best of lessons. See a case; figure out what […]
At the North Pole, the magnetic compass apparently spins at random, not knowing where to point. Is it because there’s no North? or is North everywhere? That’s the way I feel about this Atypical Antipsychotic story I’ve been preoccupied with for a couple of months. It’s like everyone’s walking around with a compass that doesn’t […]
In the case of Seroquel or Abilify, we inferred ghost-writing from the Acknowledgments for editorial or writing support. In the cases exposed by POGO involving GlaxoSmithKline [GSK] and Scientific Therapeutics Information [STI], the evidence was more direct [emails and proposals]. But Lilly‘s Zyprexa made it a lot easier. They just said it outright: “The paper […]
Lilly continued to fight the association of Zyprexa with Diabetes, and specifically Zyprexa‘s leading the "metabolic syndrome" pack. Then, in December 2006, the New York Times began a series on Lilly and Zyprexa based on leaked documents: Eli Lilly Said to Play Down Risk of Top Pill New York Times By ALEX BERENSON December 17, […]
I left off in 2001 when Lilly was winding up to pitch that Primary Care Physicians should treat major mental illness from a symptom list using Zyprexa, and was continuing to deny the drug’s association with Diabetes. But the reports began to appear the literature: Atypical antipsychotic-induced diabetes mellitus: how strong is the evidence? Henderson […]
Zyprexa [Olanzapine] is a solid antipsychotic, effective in the treatment of Schizophrenia. There’s never been a question about that, so it was an early market success. But, as mentioned in the last post, Lilly was after more than the limited Schizophrenia market and had come up with the strategy to market it to Primary Care […]
The "Zyprexa Documents" were released from legal discovery and posted at Furious Seasons in 2007. This slide is from an Eli Lilly 1994 "Life Plan" for Zyprexa. It pretty much summarizes the state of excitement from those salad days of the mid-1990s. Clozapine was the gold standard for Efficacy, but flunked Safety. The manufacturers of […]