[click image for link] Scanning through the preliminary program for next month’s APA Convention in San Francisco, I ran across the Presidential Symposium above. One doesn’t have to ponder very long to figure out who is the target of was the stimulus for this symposium – Dr. Allen Frances and some others of us who […]
Talking Rock Creek nearby was so named by the Cherokee because the rocky bed creates so much turbulence in places that the stream itself seems to be speaking simultaneously in multiple tongues. When I first encountered it, I thought of the many stories that make one up a single person’s narrative, all playing at the […]
New Views into the Brain NIMH Director’s Blog By Thomas Insel April 10, 2013 … This week marks the publication of a new tool that may alter the way we look at the brain. Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford University have developed a method they call CLARITY. Yes, CLARITY is an acronym, for […]
Big Pharma Pockets $711 Billion in Profits by Robbing Seniors, Taxpayers Huffington Post by Ethan Rome 04/08/2013 Here’s an outrage that must be changed: Big Pharma has been systematically price-gouging the Medicare program for seniors and people with disabilities – and raking in billions in excessive profits. The 11 largest global drug companies made an […]
The Double Blind Randomized Placebo Controlled Clinical Trial [RTC] is such a standard methodology that it’s hard to realize that it even had an origin – more like something that came to us as the glaciers receded. But that’s not even close. It came to us in that era of bomb shelters, hula-hoops, hot-rods, and […]
Even when there’s no cure for an illness, it’s helpful for the afflicted to know what’s wrong – why they’re having trouble thinking: Right on schedule…
Back in the fall [c’est la vie…], I happened onto a site for a European group [STOP-DSM] centered in France that opposed the DSM [not just the DSM-5] and its influence on the ICD [International Classification of Diseases]. Here’s what I had to say about it back in November: Rather than trying to synopsize their […]
In my mind, I call openings like this the Sally Laden Memorial Global Burden of Depression Opening Paragraphs after the most famous of our ghost writers: Psychiatric Drug Development: Diagnosing a Crisis The Dana Foundation: Cerebrum By Steven E. Hyman April 02, 2013 [full text available on-line] During the past three years the global pharmaceutical […]
I know it’s not a psychopharmacology drug, but Tamiflu has become the index case for data transparency thanks to the efforts of Peter Doshi, Tom Jefferson, Ben Goldacre, Fiona Godlee, the Cochrane Collaboration and 44,047 current signers of the AllTrials petition. There have been false alarms before, but this report in the BMJ certainly looks […]
…sometimes, all one can do is stand in awe. "Head of Healthcare and Key Opinion Leader Management." It sounds like a riddle, "If a Key Opinion Leader is Managed, can it still be called an Opinion?" Amazing…