American Journal of Psychiatry
ddobbs | March 5, 2009An ongoing topic here -- raised in depth here, and most recently here -- is how psychiatry is going to right itself from being knocked off-course and off-kilter by its overcozyness with pharma and a corresponding picture of mental disorder.
Psychiatrist Danny Carlat -- one of many dismayed by psychiatry's directtion over the last few years -- sees signs in a recent commentary in the American Journal of Psychiatry, signed by 26 highly prominent psychiatrists, that the discipline is starting to get it.
The key point of the commentary is stated in its title, "Conflict of Interest: An Issue…
ddobbs | March 5, 2009Philip Dawdy takes a interesting look at a new study of the safety of placebo arms in clinical trials of antidepressants in teens. My own quick scan of the study [which Dawdy makes available as pdf download] suggests it's full of great nuggets.
Its take-home: Placebo treatments produced remission rates of 48%, while the rate for active treatment was 59%. And, quite interestingly, the study concludes:
Patients who responded to placebo generally retained their response. Those who did not respond to placebo subsequently responded to active treatment at the same rates as those initiallyl…
ddobbs | March 4, 2009I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just coincidence that brings in a few days an archetypal pharma scandal, an unexpected and emphatic Supreme court reversal, an underwear check administered to the entire faculty of the Harvard Medical School, and the decision to "make an example" of surgeons who took kickbacks for using medical devices.
The…