{"id":4191,"date":"2010-06-19T17:54:36","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T21:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4191"},"modified":"2010-06-20T09:41:26","modified_gmt":"2010-06-20T13:41:26","slug":"ru-486-and-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/06\/19\/ru-486-and-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"10. RU-486 and stuff…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I have obviously been stirred up by the re-emergence of the story of Dr. Charlie Nemeroff <\/strong>who became Chairman of Psychiatry at Emory several years after I left the Department over 20 years ago:<\/div>\n
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    the trivialization of america … <\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    science lite… <\/font><\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    I blog for a number of reasons, but one of them is to "get things off my chest," and it’s obvious that this had weighed heavily for a long time. Something I’ve learned in writing these posts should’ve been apparent way back when, but it wasn’t. Dr. Nemeroff rode into Emory during a wave of "brain psychology" in Psychiatry that swept away many more "mind psychology" types than just me. What I realize is that the psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of the 50’s, 1960’s , and 70’s had been as imperious as the Nemeroffs that replaced them – occupying the Chairmanships, dominating the government grants, presiding over the American Psychiatric Association, just as the biologists have done for the last thirty years ["bipartisanship" is as elusive in scientific disciplines as it is in Congress]. The pendulum probably needed to swing when it did. So in part, I was caught up in a big paradigm shift<\/strong><\/a> that I didn’t recognize at the time. And I didn’t realize that the "mind" people had historically demeaned the "brain" people, and earned some of the wrath that came their way as the pendulum swung the other way. <\/div>\n

    So what else is there to say more about the controversy surrounding Dr. Nemeroff’s moving to Miami’s Department of Psychiatry? There are, actually, several other things. While the issue on the table is Conflict of Interest [COI], the term doesn’t do justice to what actually happened. It does seem that the case that got Dr. Nemeroff demoted, raking in speaker fees from GlaxoSmithKlein Pharmaceuticals and serving on some of their boards while being a Principle Investigator of a large NIMH grant studying their products, is obviously a COI. But there were cases that more directly spoke to his lack of integrity, though they seems to have escaped as much notoriety.<\/p>\n

    \"AlanDr. Nemeroff is the co-author of a popular textbook, The Textbook of Psychopharmacology<\/strong><\/a> [$228.00], with the Chairman of Psychiatry at Stanford, Dr. Alan Schatzberg [the outgoing president of the American Psychiatric Association<\/strong>]. They were jointly autographing the new edition of their book at the recent APA convention in New Orleans earlier this year. Well it seems that they were more than just two Department Chairman who as friends and colleagues authored a textbook together. They are also business associates in a company called Corcept<\/font><\/strong><\/a>, and they are both also targets of a Congressional Investigation by Senator Chuck Grassley into a Conflict of Interest.<\/p>\n

    It’s a complex story that involves the drug Mifepristone <\/strong>[RU-486<\/strong>]. If you’ve heard of it, it’s because it’s the "abortion pill," often in the news as the abortion debate has raged on in America. The drug is an antagonist to Progesterone and Glucocorticoids. Corcept<\/font><\/strong> was formed by Dr. Schatzberg and a colleague in 1998 with the idea of using it in Psychotic Depression, based on their hypothesis that Cortisol has something to do with that. This became one of the big Conflict of Interest Cases looked at by Senator Grassley, in that Schatzberg did not reveal his involvement with Corcept<\/font><\/strong>, yet was the Primary Investigator in an NIMH funded drug trial. The drug has never been introduced and probably never will be [because it doesn’t work]. Meanwhile, Dr. Schatzman made plenty of money on the deal. Here’s the story:<\/div>\n