Last week, we watched in awe as the authorities were able to mobilize technology to solve a pretty sticky problem – finding the Boston bombers. By the third day, there was enough mass video assembled to identify them on national media [upper right]. I was personally impressed by that top shot from an iPhone [suspect […]
Cochrane signs up to AllTrials initiative to campaign for registration and reporting of all clinical trials Cochrane Collaboration Press Release April 19 , 2013 The Cochrane Collaboration, the international not-for-profit organization that produces systematic reviews of healthcare evidence and the largest database of randomized controlled trials, published online in The Cochrane Library, has today formalized […]
Psychiatry and the Myth of “Medicalization” Psychiatric Times By Ronald W. Pies, MD April 18, 2013 Whatever happened to common sense? You know what I mean—these psychiatrists medicalize every ordinary feeling and behavior, every normal stress and strain of living. Why, the way they want to call ordinary shyness “Social Anxiety Disorder,” or ordinary grief […]
Among the misadventures of alliances between the pharmaceutical industry and academic psychiatry, the saga of Dr. Biederman’s group at Harvard and their Pediatric Bipolar Disorder craze is in the running as the paradigm of the genre. I recently looked back on it [the sound and the fury…] when I ran across some latter day ripples […]
"The new framework will not replace the DSM, which is too important to discard…" Only Rip Van Winkle would not to know that academic psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association [APA], and the National Institute of Mental Health [NIMH] have been united in their assumption that mental illness is a manifestation of brain disease since the […]
Dr. David Healy has just published the fourth installment [4/6] of his series on clinical trials: Not So Bad Pharma – March 28 April Fool in Harlow: Anecdote Fishing in Harlow – April 1 The Tragedy of Lou Lasagna – April 9 The Empire of Humbug: Bad Pharma – April 15 Most of us are […]
Letter to a Foreign Psychiatrist Psychiatric Times By Seyyed Nassir Ghaemi April 11, 2013 I write to you as an American who was once not an American. Of course, all Americans, at one time, were not Americans, but there is still a prototype: the Christian American of European descent. I’m not in that majority, so […]
Does DSM-5 Have a Captive Audience? Huffington Post by Allen Frances 04/14/2013 DSM-5 sells at a price gouging $200 per copy. The American Psychiatric Association has assumed that it has a fully captive audience of people who will feel compelled to buy DSM-5 for coding and reimbursement purposes – even if they don’t like its […]
Looking through the Preliminary Program for the American Psychiatric Association meeting in San Francisco next month was not exactly a trip down memory lane for me, though it reminded me of a former time. There was a time when I would look over such a program with excitement about what sessions I might go to. […]
Is it just me, or is everyone having trouble finding Pharmalot? Note: Annonymous to the rescue. I had to delete all of my cookies and the cache, and now it works. I’ve lost my cookies, and I don’t even miss them! Thanks…