The first half of medical school was hard for me. Unlike college, the material itself wasn’t that difficult, but there was just so much of it. And after college, two more years of lecture halls, labs, and endless facts was a lot, no matter how fascinating. I had nothing to hang the deluge of unfamiliar […]
A few days ago, I was talking about a Venn diagram [in proxies…] I’d sketched on the back of an envelope [left above]. A more accurate version of what it really looked like originally is on the right. What I was trying to get at is that in the Clinical Trial process, the motives of […]
When I clicked on Psychiatric News, this flashed across the top banner: Maternal Depression May Impact Brains of Unborn Children PsychiatricNews by Joan Arehart-Treichel September 27, 2013 Evidence that depression can be transmitted from a pregnant woman to her unborn child was published online August 21 in Biological Psychiatry. Anqi Qiu, Ph.D., an associate professor […]
So much of this blog has been about the inappropriate use of psychoactive medications particularly focusing on the industry sponsored clinical trials of the last several decades. Another theme has been the assault on the FDA Black Box Warnings – pediatric use of antidepressants or with Gabapentin that seemed motivated by commercial rather than medical […]
Remember the DSM-5? the controversy over removing the Bereavement Exclusion? Grief, Depression, and the DSM-5 by Zisook S, Pies R, and Iglewicz A. Journal of Psychiatric Practice. 2013 19:386-396. Based on a review of the best available evidence and the importance of providing clinicians an opportunity to ensure that patients and their families receive the […]
It’s a funny thing – getting old. When you read something that’s really wise, you still almost automatically think of the author as older and wiser, at least I do. I often feel that way when I read Howard Brody’s blog Hooked: Ethics, Medicine, and Pharma. He just seems to be able to step further […]
When you happen onto a really long blog post with lots of quotes, you can usually count on the fact that the blogger is out to prove something and getting his/her facts in a row. I usually skip to the end [or move on], being an impatient scanner myself. So I thought I’d start with […]
In objectively…, I was taken with the coordinated triad of the the cover story, an editorial [Workplace Depression: Personalize, Partner, or Pay the Price], and a STAR*D article [Increase in Work Productivity of Depressed Individuals With Improvement in Depressive Symptom Severity] in this month’s American Journal of Psychiatry – all directed towards the cost burden […]
Back to psychiatric drugs, this time last year, I was in a conversation about the early days of drug discovery in psychiatry and was pointed to a study from 1959, A CONTROLLED TRIAL OF IMIPRAMINE IN TREATMENT OF DEPRESSIVE STATES [full text on-line]. That paper lead me to The History of Psychopharmacology and the CINP, […]
Decline in placebo-controlled trial results suggests new directions for comparative effectiveness research. by Olfson M and Marcus SC. Health Affairs. 2013 32[6]:1116-1125. The Affordable Care Act offers strong support for comparative effectiveness research, which entails comparisons among active treatments, to provide the foundation for evidence-based practice. Traditionally, a key form of research into the effectiveness […]