NaturalNews, November 29,2010
by David Gutierrez
GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturer of Paxil, paid Palazzo $5,000 for every child she enrolled in the study.
A psychiatrist on the payroll of GlaxoSmithKline has been sentenced to 13 months in prison after pleading guilty to committing research fraud in trials of the company’s antidepressant Paxil on children.
Maria Carmen Palazzo is already serving a sentence of 87 months for defrauding Medicare and Medicaid.
Palazzo was accused by the FDA of enrolling children in a clinical trial even though she knew they did not actually suffer from major depressive or obsessive compulsive disorder, the conditions being studied. Palazzo then falsified records and psychiatric diagnoses.
GlaxoSmithKline, manufacturer of Paxil, paid Palazzo $5,000 for every child she enrolled in the study.
The case’s significance goes beyond simple research fraud, as Glaxo is now defending itself against charges that for 15 years it deliberately concealed evidence that Paxil increases the risk of suicide in children.
Glaxo is also defending itself against accusations that it manipulated data to conceal the risks of its diabetes blockbuster Avandia, and that it failed to warn parents that Paxil may cause birth defects if taken by pregnant women. The company has already agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle roughly 700 birth defect lawsuits; another 100 or so suits are pending.
Although the FDA eventually required Paxil to carry a warning about the risk of birth defects and an even more prominent “black box” warning about suicide risk, many critics allege that the agency acted too slowly.
“There [had] been hints for many years that antidepressants, such as Paxil, when given to children, can cause serious side effects, including suicide, but the FDA delayed taking any action to prevent these drugs from being prescribed for children,” writes Brent Hoadley in Too Profitable to Cure.
Palazzo will not actually serve any additional prison time for potentially placing children’s safety at risk; her new term will be served concurrently with her first.
http://www.naturalnews.com/030557_psychiatry_fraud.html
News Feed
Related Posts
Tags: Antidepressant, birth defects, black box warning, children, clinical trials, FDA, fraud, Maria Carmen Palazzo, Medicaid, Medicare, Paxil, psychiatrist
This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 11:50 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Donate
Ugh! Only a 13-month sentence for a medication that’s proven to cause suicide and no extra prison time? At least it’s more bad PR, but still! Has she at least been banned from practicing?
I think that her fellow psychs have now to give her a label and a taste of her own medicine, then she will know the taste and filling.
dont trust yourself or your children or your community to the big pharmaceuticals. ask lots of questions. your ignorance and subsequently your child’s abuse by this type of physician turns into dollars by the sickness of this rampant system. “no thanks” so simple, yet not used enough………
It’s obviously expedient to the FDA to spotlight this one among the many psyco-whores pimping their policies. Gives the false impression that such practices are exceptional and that FDA is applying due diligence in it’s role of protecting the nation’s health. With such rare cases as this, it would be good to get the inside scam from the indicted. After all, her standards are so low they’re invisible and she probably doesn’t understand that she has done anything out of the ordinary. In this respect, she would be sadly correct.