This post is just a remark about history, some of it my own. I wasn’t always a psychiatrist. I started my medical hegira as an Internist, and my first experience practicing was on an overseas Air Force Base seeing active duty soldiers and their dependents [only by referral]. There were a lot of symptoms, and […]
“We are at an extraordinary moment when the entire scientific foundation for mental health is shifting, with the 20th century discipline of psychiatry becoming the 21st century discipline of clinical neuroscience,” Thomas Insel said before a meeting on the challenges facing mental health research at the Royal Society in London on 31 August… The seismic […]
We live in a time of meta-analyses [studies of studies]. This one selected the 15 new drugs approved during 2012 from large pharmaceutical companies [from among 48 new drugs approved that year]. They looked at all trials [from all phases] to see if they were registered, reported, published, or reported-or-published [public]. They also partitioned them […]
I have rarely been so surprised as I was last night when I read the AMA Press Release about Direct-To-Consumer [DTC] advertisements on television [reprinted here in pinch me!…]. I remember when they started back in the late 1990s. One day, a patient said, "Do you think I-forget-which-drug is right for me?" And I remember […]
The author of the blog Psych Practice and I are psychoanalysts who have lived through the massive changes in psychiatry [and psychoanalysis] in the span of our times. By any measure, Psych Practice is a good blog to follow, but I found this post particularly well framed – Lieberman Speaks. It’s about a panel held […]
Nov. 17, 2015 AMA Calls for Ban on Direct to Consumer Advertising of Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices For immediate release: ATLANTA –Responding to the billions of advertising dollars being spent to promote prescription products, physicians at the Interim Meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA) today adopted new policy aimed at driving solutions to […]
FDA nominee Robert Califf must prove his independence from industry Pharmalot By Ed Silverman November 16, 2015 As a US Senate committee meets on Tuesday to consider Dr. Robert Califf for the top job at the Food and Drug Administration, an open question remains whether he is biased toward industry. Califf is held in high […]
hat tip to the universe…
When it’s all said and done, I’m not impressed that our kvetching about the state of affairs with clinical trials, regulatory approval, pharmaceutical marketing, and the corruption and glitches along these processes will be particularly effective in the long run. We now know the problems, and we know they are sustained by a powerful set […]
In psychiatry, we’re rarely afforded the definitive data enjoyed in a lot of science. It’s just the way things are. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be glad when some definitive graphs come along – particularly when they support clinical experience. The data in this 2004 paper is an example. I received this link from […]