Introducing AMP: The Accelerating Medicines Partnership NIH Director’s Blog by Dr. Francis Collins February 4, 2014 It would seem like there’s never been a better time for drug development. Recent advances in genomics, proteomics, imaging, and other technologies have led to the discovery of more than a thousand risk factors for common diseases—biological changes that […]
Arkansas court tosses $1.2B judgment against J&J Associated Press By CHUCK BARTELS Mar 20, 2014 The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday overturned a $1.2 billion judgment against Johnson & Johnson in a lawsuit challenging the drugmaker’s marketing of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. The court ruled that the state improperly sued under a law that applies […]
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been something of a bruhaha over the publication of Richard Noll’s article, When Psychiatry Battled the Devil, in the Psychiatric Times. It appeared in early December on-line, then disappeared a week later without a trace. It’s the story of the epidemic of acronymed cases of SRA [Satanic Ritual Abuse], […]
Instead of paying doctors to promote their drugs, GlaxoSmithKline has decided to pay doctors to promote their drugs. Yeah, you read that right… Glaxo to Bring Doctors In-House as Educational Speakers Bloomberg By Makiko Kitamura Mar 17, 2014 GlaxoSmithKline plans to hire doctors to educate their peers about its drugs instead of paying external speakers, […]
Recently, I veered from my usual topic of psychiatric medications and their producers to a similar issue with a drug from my past life, Pradaxa®, and anticoagulant used to prevent clots forming in cases of atrial fibrillation – an irregular heart rhythm [how many examples?…, foot-in-mouth disease…]. Such clots can cause thrombo-embolic strokes. Now, Roy […]
Psycritic wrote a post in response to my on the wrong side of the equation… where I was making an analogy between dress designers having to constantly generate new products to keep the game going and some of our psychiatric KOLs who seem lost without something new from the psychopharmacologic pipeline. He had another take […]
Psychiatry as a Clinical Neuroscience Discipline by Thomas R. Insel, MD and Remi Quirion, Ph.D, FRSC, CQ JAMA. 2005 294: 2221–2224. [full text on-line] In this commentary, we argue that psychiatry’s impact on public health will require that mental disorders be understood and treated as brain disorders. One of the fundamental insights emerging from contemporary […]
“… clinicians have to decide on treatments and therefore the best goal, interim goal at least, we may want to understand the pathophysiology better and I’m not against that, but I think we have to help clinicians decide on one versus the other treatment." Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, Mayflower Conference, October 2009 “More needs to be […]
You can’t really erase history, even though we all try. For one thing, it doesn’t go away. It just sits there in the background having an effect even if it has been selectively removed from consciousness. Freud made the analogy of The Mystic Writing Pad [when I was a kid, it was called the Magic […]
My first encounter with the work of Dr. Robert Gibbons, a statistician and the University of Chicago, was a couple of articles in which he challenged the Black Box warning on antidepressants for adolescents – declaring them both safe and effective. His analysis was based on a private, unavailable dataset. Besides the unavailability of the […]