Just when you think you’ve found the bottom of a rotten barrel, you poke through and there’s even more corruption below. Read these [because you can’t not read them]… New Report Exposes “Patient Advocacy” Groups as a Big Pharma Scam The Intercept by David Dayen December 1, 2016 DRUG MONEY: PART I FDA Depends on […]
I ran across this article on a recent drive-by of this month’s journals. It seemed like an anachronism, like something from the past. But more than that, I had an uncanny déjà vu feeling about it. It took a while to recall why. Back when I was first looking at clinical trials [2010?], I found […]
NETWORK META-ANALYSIS: John Ioannidis Let’s face it – for as much as Congress and the evening news pundits push us to look forward to bold new medical breakthroughs, for a lot of us, this is a time for looking back over where we’ve been and cleaning up a lot of misinformation and garbled, deceitful science. […]
Hopes of preventing psychosis with fish oil flounders: study The Australian Doctor by Clare Pain 28 November, 2016 Leading psychiatrist Professor Patrick McGorry’s hopes that fish oil may protect young people from developing psychosis have proved to be unfounded. In a follow-up study of more than 300 young people at high risk of psychosis, omega-3 […]
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, […]