Who knew that there was a website called waybackmachine.org that would search for web content that was long gone? Phyllis Vine knew. That’s who knew. Remember the controversy about whether Dr. Shatzberg and Dr. Nemeroff actually wrote the textbook for Primary Care Physicians that was supported by GSK [enter the lawyers…]? Paul Thacker at POGO […]
I made an earlier analogy that the STAR*D story is like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole. But that metaphor hasn’t held up under scrutiny. A rabbit hole is enclosed. STAR*D just won’t fit. It keeps on growing. It needs a bigger place – like… well, sort of like the wide open spaces of Texas. As a […]
I’m still on STAR*D, and I put this first part in a box for two reasons – it’s convoluted, in spite of my attempts to make it clear. You might even skip it if you have an aversion to initials and technical talk. My second reason is so you can find it when you get […]
At the end of January, I wrote [evidence-based medicine I…]: … I didn’t know that people had actually applied the computer programming concept, Algorithm, to Psychiatric treatment. Nancy’s comment on the last post referred me to a couple of papers about an algorithmic computer program for the treatment of Major Depressive Disorder. The first paper […]
Picking up where I left off with STAR*D in my last post [recalculating…], let’s summarize where Dr. Pigott’s findings have brought us so far: • they changed the subjects enrolled for analysis: 931 of their 4041 subjects had not met their enrollment requirements [607 did not have HRSD scores high enough to qualify and 324 […]
The NIMH funded STAR*D trial [Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression] was initiated in 2001. The theme of the American Psychiatric Association Meeting in New Orleans that year was Mind meets Brain [though the Brain clearly won the meet]. Charles Nemeroff had recently been nicknamed the "boss of bosses" and was the newly appointed Editor […]
What good timing. Just as I finish writing about that Pharma campaign to turn mental illness into a set of symptoms treated in the General Practice offices and mention Drs. Schatzberg’s and Nemeroff’s infamous text, Recognition and Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders: A Psychopharmacology Handbook for Primary Care [see a “quintessential resource”…, roaches…, a worthy cause…, […]
As a child, I noticed that we had an odd book on our shelf – Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. When I got old enough to know what the book was about, I asked my Mom why she had it. She said she bought it during the war to find out what Hitler said that […]
Sometimes an idea comes along that sticks in the mind like it belongs there – like there was already a space patiently awaiting its arrival. After that, it might fade or seem to disappear into a cloud of other ideas and thoughts, but then it reappears with the unexpected familiarity of an old friend who […]
When I started in Psychiatry, if someone said they were going to do a study treating 4041 depressed patients [confirmed by their scores on a rating scale] using a set of sequenced treatment alternatives to relieve depression, I would have had a blank look, because then, depression wasn’t an entity. It was an emotion, an […]