A Ghostwriter Speaks Neuroskeptic 15 August 2011 PLoS ONE offers the confessions of a former medical ghostwriter: Being the Ghost in the Machine. The article [which is open access and short, so well worth a read] explains how Linda Logdberg became a medical writer; what excited her about the job; what she actually did; and […]
I suppose there’s something confirming in reading about the pharmaceutical industry’s invasion of psychiatry. Back in the 1980s when it all started, I smelled a rat, but didn’t know what was happening. It drove me a little crazy, and I ended up fleeing to private practice because I didn’t know what else to do, never […]
National Physicians Group Protests FDA Attempts to Allow Industry Influence POGO By PAUL THACKER August 11, 2011 The uproar over attempts to loosen conflict of interest rules at the FDA has prompted a response from the National Physicians Alliance (NPA), a collection of doctors who advocate for patients and public health. Unlike most physician professional […]
It fell to Kraepelin to systematically apply the medical model to the diagnosis of psychopathology, attempting a classification of mental illnesses that went beyond presenting symptoms (Havens, 1965; Shorter, 1997). But in this respect, Kraepelin’s program largely failed. Beginning in the fifth edition (1896) of his Textbook, and culminating in the seventh and penultimate edition […]
Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) Kraepelin was the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, the first to identify the two major psychoses, schizophrenia (dementia praecox) and manic-depression, and also the great reformer of the modern psychiatric institution. In spite of these unparalleled achievements, Kraepelin’s name is virtually unknown to the public and the details and extent of his […]
There’s another traditional agency that has let us down in recent years – our psychiatric journals. The literature is filled with ghost-written articles, articles that obscure data rather than make it clear, articles that reach conclusions that overstate trivial significant differences, articles that use statistical tests inappropriately that cannot be checked by the reader, articles […]
Two things happened at the same time. The first was that after five years of R&R in retirement, I agreed to work as a volunteer in a couple of charity clinics up here in North Georgia. Since I was going to be doing general clinic psychiatry instead of the psychotherapy that had been my practice […]
Subjectivity: Subjectivity may refer to the specific discerning interpretations of any aspect of experiences. They are unique to the person experiencing them, the qualia that are only available to that person’s consciousness. Though the causes of experience are thought to be "objective" and available to everyone, [such as the wavelength of a specific beam of […]
Conflict disclosure plan dropped The NIH will not require universities to create websites detailing researchers’ financial ties by Meredith Wadman Published online 1 August 2011 | Nature 476, 17 [2011]. Francis Collins hailed it as a "new era of clarity and transparency in the management of financial conflicts of interest." But the director of the […]
Earlier [time for some [potentially disillusioning] research…] I wrote… But the part that gets to me is that the Academic Institutions are on the wrong side of this battle. "During the public comment period last summer, the Association of American Universities and the AAMC submitted a joint statement saying: ‘There are serious and reasonable concerns […]