So on Thanksgiving, this blog disappeared from the Internet – lock stock and barrel. We were out of town, and I couldn’t reach the Hosting Company until Sunday. It seems that I was under a DDoS attack… A DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service is an attack against the server which uses a wide range […]
I’ve run across two recent commentaries on Akathisia recently. In discussing those meta-analyses of the SSRI/SNRIs as "precursors" of suicidality [Peter Gøtzsche et al], I was using multiple terms [Activation, Akathisia, Agitation, Anxiety, Agita] to talk about the broad topic of an Adverse Reaction to these drugs. My own notion of the meaning of the […]
With all the talk of immigration this last year, I’ve been particularly aware of my father’s childhood stories – learning English when he went to school and growing up as a poor immigrant during the Depression in the coal belt. He came South to play football in college and never went back, saying ironically, "There […]
Major Depressive Disorder [MDD] is a term that originated in the DSM-III in 1980 as a descriptive diagnosis, a fix for perceived difficulties with the previous diagnostic system. It replaced a number of previous diagnoses that its author, Robert Spitzer, thought could not be clearly discriminated – things like depressive neurosis, the melancholic depressions, involutional […]
The Bookmobile came every other Saturday. And once the Bookmobile Lady got to know you, she brought wonderful things you didn’t even know existed. Two weeks is a very long time, so there was a shelf with Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedias to fill in the gaps. But neither rivaled the Downtown Library where the selection seemed […]
The presidential election is finally over and I want to get back to where I left off last month in the post in polite company… when I said: Articles like these are part of a great big wake-up call, and I’m not sure they’re reaching the right audience in the right ways. For the moment, […]
The classic Psychologist laboratory animal study involves genetically identical rats living in cages divided into two groups – one control group and one with some experimental intervention. Blinded observations of some pre-defined outcome parameter are recorded and the groups compared statistically at the end of the study. By making everything about the groups exactly the […]
They just don’t seem to know when to stop – when they’ve stepped over the line. However, this particular campaign reveals PHARMA’s principle strategy in misrepresenting their wares: Manufacturers tell FDA why they should be able to promote drugs and devices off label by Jeanne Lenzer British Medical Journal. 2016 355:i6098 Manufacturers have told the […]
Good Risk Management Requires Good Documentation PSYCHIATRICNEWS by Anne Huben-Kearney, R.N., B.S.N., M.P.A. October 31, 2016 The importance of good documentation cannot be overstated. Documentation can provide evidence of care provided or not provided; serve to promote patient safety and minimize error; ensure regulatory, accreditation, and reimbursement compliance; provide an effective defense in a medical […]
We live in an age of Meta-Analyses and Systematic Reviews [studies of studies]. Some, like watchdog John Ioannidis, lament their frequency as redundant and/or unnecessary [The Mass Production of Redundant, Misleading, and Conflicted Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses]. But at least in the domain of neuroscience, I see these meta-analyses as an attempt at oversight in […]