{"id":15321,"date":"2011-10-24T20:10:24","date_gmt":"2011-10-25T00:10:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=15321"},"modified":"2015-01-05T04:31:28","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T09:31:28","slug":"pretty-loud-coi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/24\/pretty-loud-coi\/","title":{"rendered":"pretty loud coi&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div align=\"justify\">Since the post I want too talk about on <strong><font color=\"#005500\">Pharmalot<\/font><\/strong> comes from an article from the <strong><font color=\"#200020\">National Bureau of Economic Research<\/font><\/strong>, you might get a handle on who they are before proceeding:               <\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=National_Bureau_of_Economic_Research\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">National Bureau of Economic Research<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a><br \/>                                <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=SourceWatch\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Sourcewatch<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>               <\/p>\n<div align=\"center\">                 accessed 10\/24\/2011 <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>                            <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">A December 1, 2002, news story in the <em>New York Times <\/em>on the <strong><font color=\"#200020\">National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.<\/font><\/strong>, of Cambridge, MA, called the institution <span class=\"new\">non-partisan<\/span> but failed to identify a penny of the $10 million it receives in conservative philanthropic underwriting. &quot;Reporter David Leonhardt found time to report that the bureau, headed by <u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=Martin_S._Feldstein\" title=\"Martin S. Feldstein\"><font color=\"#200020\">Martin S. Feldstein<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>, guru to Bush-economics, is the &#8216;nation&#8217;s premier economic research organization,&#8217; but couldn&#8217;t do a simple Google search to determine where it gets its money. But reporter Leonhardt &#8216;does&#8217; have some interesting things to say about Harvard University:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>Still, Ec10, as it is known at Harvard, is hardly neutral &#8211; in its  readings or its lectures &#8211; and its point of view contributes a good  deal to his importance. Over the last two decades, thousands of Harvard  undergraduates have received a decidedly anti-tax, free-market-leaning  introduction to economics. And there&#8217;s this gem about Feldstein&#8217;s partisanship and his crappy economic analysis, &#8216;driven&#8217; by partisanship&quot;:<\/sup><\/div>\n<p>                              <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>For his part, Mr. Feldstein has shown little taste since the 1980&#8217;s for straying from the Republican Party line. In 1992, he predicted that the Clinton  administration&#8217;s tax increase would stifle economic growth and do  little to erase the deficit&#8230; In 2001, when President Bush was forming  his cabinet, Mr. Feldstein and his wife began a <em>Boston Globe<\/em> article by writing, &#8216;Paul O&#8217;Neill was an inspired choice for secretary of the Treasury.&#8217; <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Mr. Feldstein is also on the board of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company with strong Republican ties.<\/font><\/strong> And the next time you hear someone refer to Feldstein as from Harvard, remember that, according to Feldstein,  &quot;I have a Harvard office, but I hardly ever use it&#8230;&quot;<\/sup>                             <\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Funding<\/font><\/strong>: Between 1985 and 2001, the organization received $9,963,301 in 73 grants from only four foundations:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li><u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" title=\"John M. Olin Foundation\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=John_M._Olin_Foundation\"><font color=\"#200020\">John M. Olin Foundation<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u><\/li>\n<li><u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" title=\"Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=Lynde_and_Harry_Bradley_Foundation\"><font color=\"#200020\">Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u><\/li>\n<li><u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" title=\"Scaife Foundations\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=Scaife_Foundations\"><font color=\"#200020\">Scaife Foundations<\/font><\/a><font color=\"#200020\"> [Sarah Mellon Scaife]<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/li>\n<li><u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" title=\"Smith Richardson Foundation\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sourcewatch.org\/index.php?title=Smith_Richardson_Foundation\"><font color=\"#200020\">Smith Richardson Foundation<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"390\" vspace=\"5\" height=\"66\" border=\"1\" src=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/crimson.jpg\" \/><\/div>\n<div align=\"center\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thecrimson.com\/article\/2003\/2\/10\/spotlight-on-marty-harvard-students-have\/\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Spotlight on Marty<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a><br \/>                      By Eoghan W. Stafford<br \/>                      February 10, 2003<\/div>\n<p>                     <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>&nbsp;Harvard students have known for nearly two decades that Ec10  is flagrantly biased. Disgruntled students have even gone so far as to  organize Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics [SHARE]. It is a  blotch on the University&rsquo;s academic record that it has allowed Baker  Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein &rsquo;61, since he began teaching  the class in 1984, to use Harvard&rsquo;s only introductory economics course  as a forum to vent his personal views. Given students growing  frustration, and the current review of the Core Curriculum, the  administration must reform Ec10.<\/p>\n<p>                      Even the national media is catching  on. In a Dec. 1 profile of Professor Feldstein, the New York Times  recognized that Ec10 is hardly neutral in its readings or its lectures.  The article reports that over the last two decades, thousands of Harvard  undergraduates have received a decidedly anti-tax, free-market-leaning  introduction to economics. Professor Juliet Schor, an Economics  professor from Boston College, was recently invited by students to speak  at Philips Brooks House on the ideologically limited nature of  Feldstein&rsquo;s course. Schor, who actually used to teach a section of Ec10,  said that she had encountered students complaining about this for  years. Schor said that the complaints go back to the 1980s when  Feldstein purged liberal ideas and readings from the curriculum and made  his lectures a venue for his own views.<\/p>\n<p>                      This clearly is an  affront to Harvard&rsquo;s rigorous academic standards. By excluding ideas and  perspectives which do not match his own, Prof. Feldstein has failed to  equip students with the full knowledge they need in order to understand a  host of contemporary issues. By presenting a one-sided view of the  discipline, he also risks putting off many students who would otherwise  have pursued further studies in economics. But, what is most  shameful is Professor Feldstein&rsquo;s intellectual dishonesty. Suppressing  the critical examination of alternative ideas is unbecoming of a Harvard  professor, and should not be tolerated. Unfortunately, the  administration has tolerated this state of affairs for nearly twenty  years&#8230;<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">If that&#8217;s not enough, check him out on <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Martin_Feldstein\"><u><strong><font color=\"#000099\">Wikipedia<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a> &#8211; he was a bit too Conservative for Reagan [and, by the way, he doesn&#8217;t teach Ec10 anymore]. He also has a profile as a Board Member on the <a href=\"http:\/\/investor.lilly.com\/committees.cfm\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#990000\">Eli Lilly<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a> site. Now on to <strong><font color=\"#005500\">Pharmalot<\/font><\/strong>:               <\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div align=\"center\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.pharmalot.com\/2011\/10\/did-antidepressant-warnings-lower-school-grades\/\">Did Antidepressant Warnings Lower School Grades?<\/a><\/font> <\/strong><\/u><br \/>              <strong><font color=\"#005500\">Pharmalot<\/font><\/strong><br \/>              By Ed Silverman<br \/>              October 24th, 2011<\/div>\n<p>           <\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><sup>Ever  since the FDA added Black Box warnings to antidepressants in 2004 over  concerns the drugs could lead to teenage suicidal thoughts and actions,  there has been debate and controversy over the extent to which, if any,  the warnings did a different kind of harm. To wit, some experts argued  the publicity about side effects may have robbed teens of needed  treatment. In particular, studies suggested teen suicides subsequently  rose [see<u> <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pharmalot.com\/2008\/09\/antidepressants-suicide-rates-debated-again\/\"><font color=\"#200020\">here<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u> and <u><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.pharmalot.com\/2008\/04\/suicides-rise-as-antidepressant-use-falls-2\/\"><font color=\"#200020\">here<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>].<\/p>\n<p>                   Now, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research  attempts to measure the purported fallout in a different way. The  researchers reviewed data from National Survey on Drug Use and Health  from 2001 through 2007, and examined academic and behavioral outcomes in  more than 100,000 youngsters between ages 12 and 17. They then designed  a study to compare outcomes for those with and without a recent episode  of probable depression, which was defined as having sought professional  help for depression problems in the previous 12 months. And what did they find? &ldquo;In the periods before the FDA warnings,  there are no discernable trends in average grades for adolescents with  and without probable depression. After the FDA warnings, the average  grades dropped abruptly for depressed girls, though not for depressed  boys,&rdquo; they write. &ldquo;&hellip;We find that in 2002 and 2003, adolescents with  probable depression had grade point averages .14 to .20 points higher  than adolescents with depression in the latter half of 2004 and 2005.&rdquo;  Put another way, the grade point averages fell roughly from a B to B-. Adolescents with a recent episode of probable depression were 8.6  percentage points less likely to earn a B or better and 3.5 percentage  points less likely to earn a C or better after the FDA advisories in  early 2004, they continue. The change was driven by depressed girls, who  were 11 percentage points less likely to earn a B or better and 6  percentage points less likely to earn a C or better following the FDA  warnings. There appears to be little effect of FDA advisories and the  decline in depression treatment on the likelihood of reporting an A  average, though. No explanation is given.<\/p>\n<p>                   Grades were not the only focus. The researchers found &ldquo;similar  patterns&rdquo; for substance use and delinquency for adolescents with  probable depression, relative to other adolescents. For instance,  although depressed adolescents are much more likely to binge drink than  their peers, the FDA advisories appear to have had little effect on  binge drinking. But there was no significant effect of the FDA warnings  on attacks on others. However, among girls, the FDA advisories and decline in the treatment  of depression increased the use of illicit drugs by 5.4 percentage  points and increased non-medical prescription drug use by 4.3 percentage  points, according to the paper. As with academic outcomes, the effects  on illegal drug use and non-medical prescription drug use are driven  mainly by girls rather than boys, although the effects on cigarette use  are similar across gender. Those were depressed engaged in this sort of experience more often,  according to the researcher. About 42 percent of boys and 34 percent of  girls with a recent episode of depression reported one or more fights  in the past 12 months, compared with 25 percent of boys and 17 percent  of girls in the non-depressed group. Stealing and &ldquo;attacking&rdquo; with the  intent to hurt someone was less common. Less than 10 percent of  non-depressed youngsters reported this behavior, while 23 percent of  boys and 15 percent of girls in the depressed group had attacked someone  in the pevious 12 months. And substance use was more common among depressed adolescents, with  16 percent of boys and 19 percent of  girls reporting binge drinking; ,  21 percent of boys and 26 percent of girls reporting smoking cigarettes;  22 percent of boys and 21 percent of girls using an illicit drug; and 8  percent of boys and 9 percent of girls using prescription drugs  inappropriately in the previous 30 days.<\/p>\n<p>                   The upshot? &ldquo;Among depressed girls, where the effects are  concentrated,&rdquo; the authors write, &ldquo;treatment with antidepressants  increases grades by a full point [from a C to a B, for example], reduces  the chance of smoking and illicit drug use by 20 to 25 percentage  points, and reduces the chance of stealing or fighting by even greater  magnitudes [about 30 to 35 percentage points]. &ldquo;These suggest both large effects of untreated or undertreated  depression, as well as an impressive  treatment effect of  antidepressants in the community during the period leading up to  advisories and warnings regarding antidepressants,&rdquo; they conclude. The  authors are Susan Busch, an associate professor of public health at Yale University; Ezra Golberstein, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and Ellen Meara, an associate professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice [<u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w17426.pdf\"><font color=\"#200020\">here is the NBER paper<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>].<\/p>\n<p>                   Not surprisingly, the paper has already generated some pushback. For  instance, Bijan Esfandiari , an attorney with the Baum Hedland law firm,  which has filed lawsuits against various drugmakers over  antidepressants warnings and disclosure of clinical trial data, such as  GlaxoSmithKline and its Paxil pill, argues the NBER paper wrongfully  accepts the premise that teen suicides rose as a result of the warnings.  Instead, he maintains that suicide rates fell after the FDA warnings  were implemented. On his website, he writes that &ldquo;the unwarranted conclusions from the  underlying studies on which the working paper authors rely have  resoundingly been debunked&rdquo; by other scientists and the FDA, among  others [<u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.baumhedlundlaw.com\/articles\/antidepressant-suicide.php\"><font color=\"#200020\">look here<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>].  Some of the papers he refers to were co-authored by academics who had  extensive financial ties to drugmakers that sell antidepressants. Among  them was Charles Nemeroff [<u><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.pharmalot.com\/2011\/09\/just-how-close-was-nemeroff-with-glaxo\/\"><font color=\"#200020\">see this<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>].  &ldquo;Any suggestion that reduced prescriptions of antidepressants have  resulted in countless suicides is simply not supported by the data,&rdquo; he  argues.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div align=\"justify\">The reason this blog is called 1boringoldman is that I drove myself and all my friends crazy during the second Bush term trying to keep up with the spin and the Rovisms that obfuscated almost anything political for those years. I&#8217;m over that. So I&#8217;m not going to wear myself out chasing this one. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.baumhedlundlaw.com\/articles\/antidepressant-suicide.php\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Bijan Esfandiari<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a> has done a fine job. Ditto him, and ditto my last post [<u><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/24\/15285\/\" target=\"_blank\"><font color=\"#200020\">the apogee&hellip;<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>] about some of the earlier efforts to make the warnings on the antidepressants look like some kind of tree-hugger, lefty silliness. I read Ed&#8217;s post earlier, and that&#8217;s why I wrote <u><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/24\/15285\" target=\"_blank\"><font color=\"#200020\">the apogee&hellip;<\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/u>. I wanted to show how this works from the years of watching it happen in the political arena. They just keep hammering on the same thing from different directions, year after year, until they succeed in undermining what makes sense &#8211; get the other team so mad that they begin to rant, then point out that they&#8217;re ranting, ergo a bunch of raving idealists. <\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">The suicidality induced by SSRIs in adolescents is very real. And I think the people who attribute it to akisthisia are dead on the money. When I first started volunteering about five years after I retired, I was seeing kids, adolescents, and adults in a general clinic. I was a &quot;rusty pharmacologist&quot; at best and bought the textbooks recommended by my friends in Atlanta to catch up. But they were old by modern standards. Textbooks lag by four or five years, and the warnings about SSRIs in adolescents weren&#8217;t in the ones I had. I&#8217;m not a big medication person, but I gave a few depressed adolescents SSRIs without much problem [or success]. <\/p>\n<p align=\"justify\">Then came a young guy, 16 or 17. He was really depressed. Mom had remarried a retired drill sergeant [really], and he was driving them both crazy with his controlling ways and his drinking. The boy saw his way out &#8211; a Diesel Mechanic school out of state &#8211; but it was over a year away and he had become hopeless. He got called for an interview at the school, and I was afraid that he was so depressed that he wouldn&#8217;t be able to rise to the occasion, so I put him on Citalopram [$4\/month at Kroger]. After just a few days, he became &quot;crazy&quot; and like a &quot;madman.&quot; He couldn&#8217;t sleep and progressed to delirium. It cleared in a day and a half off the medication. &quot;I was jumping out of my skin. I wanted to kill, me or someone else,&quot; he said later. I learned my lesson. The end of the case? Mom got a divorce and her son went off to school this fall. Both are doing well, and I&#8217;m the wiser. I&#8217;ve seen and heard in retrospect other cases, but that&#8217;s the one that stuck in my mind. It&#8217;s like the Paxil Withdrawal syndrome I was talking about a few days ago. You just have to see it once to become a true believer. Nowadays, the only adolescents on SSRIs prescribed by me are kids with OCD, and they and their parents are explicitly warned before starting the medication.<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">I just don&#8217;t believe the <strong><font color=\"#200020\">NBER<\/font><\/strong> article, primarily because the antidepressants don&#8217;t really help depressed kids or adolescents anyway [<a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/07\/22\/tuning-the-quartet\/\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">tuning the quartet&#8230;<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>]:<\/div>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"520\" height=\"192\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/mountainstewards.org\/images\/prozac-adolescents.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"520\" height=\"215\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/mountainstewards.org\/images\/ssri-adolescents.gif\" \/><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">And I&#8217;m kind of put off by the article&#8217;s direction of appeal &#8211; bad grades, drugs, booze, smoking [where&#8217;s the rock and roll?]. I see those kids in the clinics all the time. Biological Depression is rarely their problem and I don&#8217;t think SSRIs would change much about their lives. Many of the psychiatrists in this set preach <em><strong><font color=\"#200020\">depression = biology = medication<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. That&#8217;s just not right, particularly in kids. But I would predict that the assault on these Black Box warnings will continue so long as the Pharmaceutical Industry perceives that it cuts into their potential market. And, by the way, <strong><font color=\"#200020\">Martin S. Feldstein&#8217;s<\/font><\/strong> sitting on <strong><font color=\"#990000\">Eli Lilly&#8217;s<\/font><\/strong> Board is a pretty loud coi&#8230;<\/div>\n<hr size=\"1\" \/>\n<div align=\"justify\"><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Update<\/font><\/strong> from <a href=\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2011\/10\/24\/pretty-loud-coi\/#comment-217286\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">Jazmo<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>: See Feldstein&#8217;s take from Eli Lilly and A.I.G. <a href=\"http:\/\/people.forbes.com\/profile\/martin-s-feldstein\/4791\" target=\"_blank\"><u><strong><font color=\"#200020\">here<\/font><\/strong><\/u><\/a>.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since the post I want too talk about on Pharmalot comes from an article from the National Bureau of Economic Research, you might get a handle on who they are before proceeding: National Bureau of Economic Research Sourcewatch accessed 10\/24\/2011 A December 1, 2002, news story in the New York Times on the National Bureau [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15321"}],"version-history":[{"count":42,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52909,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15321\/revisions\/52909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}