Editor Jeffrey Drazen‘s New England Journal of Medicine is back on the front burner once again. You’ll likely recall the series he introduced by reporter Lisa Rosenbaum that argued that there was an inappropriate preoccupation with conflict of interest in general and they specifically pondered lifting the ban on review articles and editorials by authors […]
In my time in psychiatry, the specialty has often been shaped by its critics. When I arrived in 1974, Thomas Szasz was one of those major critics. While his principle focus was on civil liberties in his opposition to involuntary hospitalization and treatment, his argument was more fundamental – that the whole notion of mental […]
The American Psychiatric Association Preliminary Scientific Program for the Annual Meeting is on-line, and I was perusing it looking for something specific. I remain awed that the Harvard Master Class Psychopharmacology Course still has veterans from Chuck Grassley’s Senate Investigation [see april fools day – 2016…]. So I was curious to see if they were […]
The CDC today published prescribing guidelines aimed at opioid painkillers Pharmalot by Ed Silverman March 15, 2016 After months of controversy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today published prescribing guidelines to address the epidemic of deaths and overdoses attributed to opioid painkillers. The guidelines, which focus on chronic pain except for cancer and […]
In Dr. Fava’s editorial from the last post [what can be done…], he wrote: The Inadequacy of EBM Recently, Richardson and Doster suggested the consideration of three dimensions in the process of evidence-based decision: baseline risk of poor outcomes from an index disorder without treatment responsiveness to the treatment option vulnerability to the adverse effects […]
Usually, when I run across an important article that’s available on-line, I just suggest reading it and add my own comments. This time, I’m both suggesting reading it and I’m pulling quotes too. Read in isolation, the quotes below sound like injunctions but that’s not how they’re written – more as suggestions. So the imperative […]
Editorial US Preventive Services Task Force Recommendation Statement on Screening for Depression in Adults Not Good Enough by Charles F. Reynolds III, MD and Ellen Frank, PhD JAMA Psychiatry. 2016 73[3]:189-190. The US Preventive Services Task Force [USPSTF] has recommended screening for depression in the general adult population, including pregnant and postpartum women, with the […]
In the summer of 2012, the pipeline was finally empty. The pharmaceutical industry was shutting down CNS research efforts for lack of yield. After decades of a steady flow of new drugs and indications, the well had run dry. As the patents on the older drugs began to expire, a cloud of gloom hovered over […]
In case you don’t recognize the author of the BMJ blog below, he’s the former New England Journal of Medicine Editor who was fired in 1999 for upholding the principles that had made that prestigious journal great. As far as I’m concerned, Jerome Kassirer, his predecessor Arnold Relman, and his Assistant Editor Marcia Angell [later […]
This post is too long, too heavily referenced, and too detailed. I apologize for that up front. The question it raises seems simple and important to me, but you have to swim through a mighty murky swamp to find that question, and I don’t see any other way to get to it that isn’t too […]