Later: At the end of a three year Air Force assignment to the USAFE hospital in Lakenheath England, it was about time to come home to our real lives. For our last trip to the Continent, we decided on camping through France. I had several weeks of leave and though we’d been to France often, we […]
While I was writing this earlier post [it just is what it is…] about a man who had had his Paxil dose inappropriately raised in response to withdrawal symptoms, I wondered why I was even writing it. Was I patting myself on the back for having developed a high level of suspicion about withdrawal symptoms? […]
I was reading along in Dr. Makari’s Opinion piece in the New York Times when I got to the final paragraphs where he artfully articulated something I’ve been trying to say for a very long time: Psychiatry’s Mind-Brain Problem New York Times – Opinion By GEORGE MAKARI NOV. 11, 2015 … Unfortunately, Dr. Kane’s study […]
An open letter to all US Presidential candidates Medical experiments on humans [clinical trials] are carried out in the hope of improving health and furthering science. By their very nature they entail uncertainty about potential harms and benefits of a treatment or a procedure. This is why following WWII, prior ethics review by an independent […]
It was towards the end today’s clinic. He was a big guy, friendly, seemed neither anxious nor depressed. He had come to have his meds refilled. He was on Paxil 60mg in the morning and Remeron 45mg at night. He launched right into his story: He had always worked Construction, but when the housing market […]
O! be some other name: What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet; So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, Retain that dear perfection which he owes Without that title. William Shakespeare It’s hard to imagine that the Journal of the American Medical Association […]
While I’ve given up political blogging for good, there is a story I followed in the past that may finally be coming to a long awaited resolution. It’s the story of Burma [Myanmar] which is under a military dictatorship backed by the world’s largest standing army. Since my summary in 2007 [getting up to speed […]
Tom Jefferson is an epidemiologist with the Cochrane Collaboration- a central figure in the reviews of Tamiflu® concluding that it was not the panacea for influenza claimed by the manufacturer. Later, along with Peter Doshi, David Healy, Kay Dickersin, and Swaroop Vedula, he authored the RIAT proposal [see Restoring invisible and abandoned trials: a call […]
This is just some fluff. After all this time looking at the industry-funded clinical trials [RCTs], I’ve learned a few tricks for spotting the mechanics of deceit being used, but I realize that I need to say a bit about the basic science of RCTs before attempting to catalog things to look for. Data Transparency […]