If you’re a psychotherapist and nobody teaches you this, your patients will make sure you know it. The 12 Step Recovery programs even have it as part of one of their Steps, "… and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it." People in psychotherapy, by definition, have to learn that they’re wrong about a lot […]
NIMH to Implement New Strategy for Evaluating Psychiatric Research Proposals PsychiatricNews Alert March 5, 2014 Changing NIMH Clinical Trials: Efficiency, Transparency, and Reporting National Institute of Mental Health by Nitin Gogtay, M.D., and Tom Insel, M.D. February 27, 2014 A New Approach to Clinical Trials Director’s Blog: NIMH by Tom Insel M.D. February 27, 2014 […]
We often use cracks as a metaphor: unwanted things [like weeds] shooting up through the cracks or things disappearing by falling through the cracks. The last post [kudus to AL·AK·AR·ID·IN·NC·OK·RI·UT·WI…], is an industry attempt to insure a crack in the new Sunshine Law – drug reps handing out reprints from peer reviewed journals to doctors […]
From the letter in the last post… October 28, 2013 Secretary Kathleen Sebelius U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 200 Independence Avenue, S.W. Washington, D.C. 20201 Dear Secretary Sebelius: The undersigned physician organizations representing both national medical societies and state medical societies are writing to express our serious concerns about the Center for Medicare […]
The OEDC [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] is a treasure trove for various statistics. They just released Health at a Glance 2013. It has an interesting write-up on the impact of the 2008 recession on world healthcare spending among many other things: Growth in health spending has slowed markedly in almost all OECD countries […]
I have a bit of a hobby over the last several years. When the APA Annual Meeting program comes out, I scan it for names from the old guard – people on Senator Grassley’s unreported income list, various other KOLs, etc. Some are still there. Alan Schatzberg is reporting on iSPOT and doing a Recent […]
In musings…, the thing I was musing about wasn’t, apparently, clearly stated based on some emails and tweets that came my way. Here’s another shot. I work as a volunteer in a local charity clinic. There are several reasons, but one of the main ones is that the local primary care physicians and my colleagues […]
Well, next weekend, the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees meets in Arlington, VA. This will be their first meeting since APA Speaker Dr. Mindy Young’s letter to the Trustees was published about what has been called the Kupfer Affair [or for that matter, since my Open Letter to the Board of Trustees]. I doubt […]
Wednesday, I was writing about the NZ survey of patients’ experience taking antidepressants [a surprising finding…] titled Adverse emotional and interpersonal effects reported by 1829 New Zealanders while taking antidepressants. From the title and references, one can assume that the authors were honing in on the more subtle and understudied "emotional and interpersonal effects" of […]
Last night when I was looking for what I’d read previously about the Zohydro™ER issue, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Here are a few of the articles I couldn’t find: Emails point to ‘troubling’ relationship between drug firms, regulators. Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, October 6, 2013 Pharmaceutical firms paid to attend meetings of […]