This is neither an excuse nor a reasonable explanation – just what happened. When I was at Emory twenty-five years before this article was written, we were flat broke. We had a department that had relied for decades on the NIMH, the State, the County, and some private hospitals for funds to pay our trainees and faculty. That was true in academia medicine-wide, but psychiatry didn’t have the means other specialties had to generate funding. We were operating on a wing and a prayer – running on fumes. So when people like Dr. Nemeroff came along who knew how to raise money, they were welcomed with open arms in lots of academic places in similar straits. By that time, I was gone from the full time faculty, but only a mile or two from my old office. And I watched with amazement as the department went from rags to riches. I knew it had to do with drugs and research, because that’s all they talked about, but like many, I missed the full extent of what that meant.<\/div>\n
But back to the thread, that’s how we ended up with such a collection of people in high places – people who could raise money for the University Departments like the part in red above. And "the rationale for their funding our faculty in such a manner would be my service on these boards" <\/font><\/strong>wasn’t the full story. It was the alliance with the universities, their academic reputations, and their credentials that accounted for pharma’s generosity – a commerce that was mutually advantageous for quite a while. While I wouldn’t argue for a minute with either Psycritic’s assessment of the mindset<\/em> in question or his diagnosis, the former chairman mentioned above and Emory’s Dr. Nemeroff below were pointing out that they were just doing what they were hired to do. And, by the way, they were lining their own pockets along the way. I’m not sure they were just thinking they were doing good as a rationalization, from their vantage, they were doing their jobs. While the back story of all of this is obvious now, it wasn’t so obvious before – wrapped in a cloak of science, research, discovery, evidence-based medicine, a lack of transparency, and whatever one calls the sweet smell of success<\/em>. <\/p>\nI expect we know the answers to the questions now [
what is this whole conflict of interest business, anyway?<\/em> and why shouldn’t psychiatrists take part in entrepreneurial activities?<\/em>]. It was ultimately a destructive and time-limited solution to a very real problem, one that hasn’t gone away – though for the most part, pharma has moved on down the road. When the past is still this close and the damage this apparent, the future remains in the haze. What we know for sure is "not this"…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Conflicts of Interest Psycritic January 26, 2014 The following story was recounted to me by someone who was there: He was indignant. Outraged, even. He was a department chair. A prominent psychiatrist and author of textbooks. A Key Opinion Leader in the field. How dare the New York Times question him? The psychiatry residents sat […]<\/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-43510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43510","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=43510"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43510\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43525,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43510\/revisions\/43525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}