One thing about the reports on this case that’s regularly omitted. Psychiatrists and other physicians were also victims in this scheme. The allegations focus on the doctors who were complicit in lending their expert status to J&J’s marketing program – creating biased algorithms, becoming traveling salesmen for J&J, etc. But that was a small number of people. The rest of us were eager for a replacement for the toxic drugs used to treat severe mental illnesses and relied on our usual sources of information about this new drug, Risperdal, that told us it was a genuine advance in both efficacy and safety. We had no way of knowing that one of our biggest sources, our literature, was being flooded with ghost-written articles commissioned by J&J, prepared by Exerptia Medica’s professional writers, and published under the names of recruited psychiatrists who were "guest authors" – lending their names and reputations but having little to no involvement in the articles themselves. Dr. Bernard Carroll coined the term "experimercials" for this genre – but we didn’t know that was what they were back then. And, in retrospect, those articles were everywhere.<\/p>\n
Had we been properly informed about Risperdal, I expect it would’ve been used with the same caution as its predecessors, and its use more limited to the real indication – Schizophrenia. At least I think that’s what we would’ve done. So in this scheme, not only were psychiatrists and primary care physicians the misinformed agents of the massive overuse of this drug and some of its followers, the doctors now bear the burden of the motive – "Psychiatrists just want to over-medicate their patients." Maybe we earned some of that on our own, but without the cheerleading KOLs, the efforts of PHARMA, the ghost-written literature, [and the pressure from managed care], the magnitude of this problem would be geometrically reduced. There were plenty of well intentioned psychiatrists and general physicians who were as duped by J&J and their compromised, pseudoscientist experts as the patients they gave these medications to.<\/p>\n
My hope for this suit is that it will inform doctors and patients alike about the dance we’ve all been a part of, and help prevent it from being perpetuated. Likewise, I hope Mr. Burns [above] is right, "They’ll lose in Texas, and then they’re going to face litigation from stockholders for failing to settle this," because the other people who need to be informed are the people who made these drugs and participated in this outrageous [and criminal] scam in the first place. Some people worry that these suits will scare off the pharmaceutical industry. From my perspective as a psychiatrist and a physician, that’s fine by me. We don’t need any more new drugs until our system for knowing how to safely use them is restored to sanity, and the pharmaceutical industry is forced to return to some kind of ethic that justifies its presence in medicine. That’s a privilege, not their right…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
J&J to Oppose Texas in $1 Billion Trial Over Risperdal Marketing Practices Bloomberg By Margaret Cronin Fisk, David Voreacos and Jef Feeley Jan 9, 2012< Johnson & Johnson, which has lost judgments of almost $660 million over the marketing of its antipsychotic drug Risperdal, goes to trial today facing a demand by Texas for damages […]<\/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_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18130","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=18130"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18135,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18130\/revisions\/18135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}