I had read a number of reports about the announcement that the Chairman of Forest Pharma Howard Solomon would be barred from Medicare/Medicaid payments because of corporate misbehavior, but I thought this was the clearest logic about this move by HHS: Will a Pharmaceutical CEO Finally Be Held Accountable for Misbehavior on His Watch? Healthcare […]
I’ve heard the term "survivor guilt" for years and I thought I knew what it meant. Back half my life ago, as it came time for my 11 years of deferments from the draft to finally run out of juice [college, medical school, internship, residency], I had become increasingly opposed to the Viet Nam War […]
Depression is one of the most prevalent and costly brain diseases. In the last major epidemiology study conducted in the United States, major depression had an overall lifetime prevalence rate of 17.1% (21% in women and 13% in men), and comparable figures have been obtained worldwide. These findings represent an increase of approximately 6% in […]
One would think that after thirty years of practicing as a Psychiatrist, it should be easy to read through this list of diagnostic criteria for Major Depressive Disorder and have something to say about it. But honestly, it leaves me as blank as it did the first time I read it back when it […]
<last screen shot before we got in the hall closet>
I just got this response [see co-med?…]: Dear Dr. 1boringoldman, Thank you for your interest in the CO-MED article. It is tentatively scheduled to be published online in May. Please let us know if you have any additional questions. Regards, Editorial Staff The American Journal of Psychiatry
In my last post, I was connecting several dots that I hadn’t realized were so closely related in both spirit and time – the review article in which Dr. Nemeroff favorably reviewed three new depression treatments without acknowledging his conflicts of interest and was called to task, and an early article chasing genetic markers for […]
This is another loose end that came up as I was trying to navigate the long and winding road to personalized medicine. I was aware of two stories, but I didn’t realize they were connected until I read this comment from Dr. Bernard Carroll about a 2004 study that I’ve looked at twice [how’s your […]
I had a ‘loose end’ from all that looking at the STAR*D study that I was reminded of thinking about "souped up" antidepressants – the CO-MED study that was to follow STAR*D. It was to be a clinical trial where they compared people started on one of a variety of antidepressants to people started on […]
In those sleepy afternoon World History classes, I used to wonder if the people in the empire of this week knew that they were just a chapter away from obscurity. We never talked about them very much [the people] – just their Kings. Years later, when we lived in Europe and saw those castles and […]