Posted by baseball55 on August 16, 2014, at 19:19:18
In reply to Re: Pdoc Suspended for over prescribing antiphychotis, posted by pontormo on August 16, 2014, at 12:17:16
This is so true. Biederman admitted to receiving $1.6m, but evidence from Grassley's committee suggests he got much more. He opened a clinical facility at Mass General funded by the maker of risperdal (then on patent, can't remember the company). Then there's this guy Nemeroff at Emory who took millions from drug companies while telling his college and the FDA that he got no more than $10,000 (the maximum allowed while on FDA contract).
I talked a length once to my psychiatrist about this. He said he's not perfect on this - attends dinners, meets with drug reps. But even if he tried to limit his info sources to journals, studies find the journals themselves are completely corrupted by pharma. Articles and research are underwritten by drug companies and only positive studies are submitted for publication.
The whole system is rotten. And it's not limited to psych drugs.
> The real scandal is that this issue of doctors' overprescribing -- and promoting the safety and usefulness of-- these newer anti-psychotics was really wide-spread. Pharma paid huge amounts of money to many very respectable pdocs to represent to the psychiatric community that these drugs were the new standard. And in return the drugs were well-received and frequently prescribed by the profession.
>
> ---~~~
> DOCUMENTS produced in recent litigation and in Congressional investigations show that some leading academic doctors have worked closely with corporate benefactors to expand the use of antipsychotics.
>
> "The most well-known is Joseph Biederman, a Harvard medical professor and Massachusetts General Hospital researcher. His studies, examining prevalence of bipolar psychological disorders in children, helped expand practice standards, leading to a fortyfold increase in such diagnoses from 1994 to 2003. The increase was reported in a 2007 study by the Archives of General Psychiatry.
>
> "Between 2000 and 2007, he also got $1.6 million in speaking and consulting fees some of them undisclosed to Harvard from companies including makers of antipsychotic drugs prescribed for some children who might have bipolar disorder, a Senate investigation found in 2008. "
>
> NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03psych.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
> --~~~
>
> This guy is by no means a lone malefactor-- the whole profession is riddle with this sort of misbehavior, and while some small extreme fringe group has been sanctioned, undoubtedly the effects of their labors on behalf of Big Pharma are still being felt.
poster:baseball55
thread:1069715
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140815/msgs/1069925.html