"Drug Maker Told Studies Would Aid It, Paper Says" | Arthritis Information
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/us/20psych.html?_r=1&ref=us
UNREAL quote, from the article:
"
In a contentious Feb. 26 deposition between Dr. Biederman and
lawyers for the states, he was asked what rank he held at Harvard.
“Full professor,” he answered.
“What’s after that?” asked a lawyer, Fletch Trammell.
“God,” Dr. Biederman responded.
“Did you say God?” Mr. Trammell asked.
“Yeah,” Dr. Biederman said."
More from In The Pipeline:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2009/03/20/what_results_did_you_have_in_mind.php
And people wonder why I dislike the arrogance of most docs. God, indeed.
Check this one out -
This is the part that bothers me -
Part of the problem is that we've been conditioned to trust university research. It is based, after all, on the presumably lofty motives of its practitioners. What's not to like about science carried out by academics who have nobly dedicated their lives to understanding the unknown, furthering knowledge and serving humanity?
. . .University researchers are in a constant battle for recognition and the rewards associated with success: research space, speaking engagements, funding and autonomy. Consequently, while academic research is often described as "curiosity-driven," the reality is messier, as (curiously) many researchers tend to pursue the trendiest technologies and explore topics that happen to be associated with the most generous levels of research support.
Moreover, since academic success is determined almost exclusively by the number and prestige of research publications, the incentives to generate results are exceedingly powerful and can encourage investigators to see patterns that may not exist, to disregard contradictory observations that might be important, to overvalue data that might be preliminary or unreliable, and to embrace conclusions that deserve to be viewed with far greater skepticism.
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Because I'd always thought our cure was coming from Academia.
Pip
Interesting article. I saw a rheum like this.
I remember common nicknames the hospital staff had for doctors. One was King Richard. He acted like we were lowly subjects or something and was even arrogant with patients. Despite that, even his bad attitude with nurses didn't stop them from choosing him with his skills in his specialty of surgery... because he was the best.
I'll try to find the funny hierarchy of doctors joke that I've seen circulating for 40 years.
CathyMarie
More on this dr.:
http://pharmagossip.blogspot.com/2009/03/dr-joseph-biedermans-new-clothes.htmlThis is from the end of the article (Pharmagossip's bold, not mine). It makes me wonder about other specialties:
"Biederman's conflict of interest problems have exposed his strong
pro-drug views to the public for scrutiny. Until now, fear of the
Biederman team has operated quietly on the small club of child
psychiatric researchers.
Only
when 2-year-olds started taking three psychiatric drugs simultaneously
under a Biederman protocol for bipolar disorder did the emperor's
clothes become so invisible as to begin the naming of names.Business
ethics, whose main concerns are profit and legal operation, collide
with medical ethics, which are directed to the patient's benefit, when
academic research is dependent on industry money. We must formulate and
enforce a new set of rules to restore doctors' credibility.
The
federal government has recently promised funds to compare existing
drugs with newer, more expensive competitors. This is a welcome shift
of emphasis away from previous drug-company-sponsored studies that only
had to prove that their drug, short term, was better than a placebo. In
the meantime, Biederman's personal travails tragically inform us about
a crisis in academic medicine that must be resolved.
Lawrence Diller, M.D., practices behavioral-developmental pediatrics in Walnut Creek and is on the clinical faculty of UCSF. "
Suzanne2009-03-27 09:32:30Ugh.
http://www.fiercepharma.com/story/study-questions-long-term-adhd-med-use/2009-03-27?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&cmp-id=OTC-RSS-FP0"The story isn't just that the drugs' advantages don't appear to hold up
over time. It's also that, when this less flattering data came to light
in 2007, some researchers tried to downplay it. And rather than
reporting that the children on meds long-term were shorter and lighter
than those who weren't on meds, a press release said children not using
meds "grew somewhat larger." "
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