Posts Tagged ‘pharmaceutical funding’

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American Academy of Pediatrics Promotes Big Pharma Agenda—Labeling and drugging 4-year-olds

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Click image to watch Psychiatric Drug Side Effects

4-year-olds on drugs? You betcha.  The  American Academy of Pediatrics issued new treatment guidelines for “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” that say ADHD can be diagnosed in kids as early as age four, and that Ritalin and similar drugs are an appropriate treatment even for children this young. Apparently the “Academy” has no problem with the fact that the US FDA warns drugs like Ritalin can cause hallucinations, mania, heart attack, stroke and sudden death. Nor do they consider it a problem that a diagnoses of “ADHD” is based solely on a checklist of behaviors such as “loses pencils or toys,” “often does not seem to listen,” “is easily distracted by extraneous stimuli,” “fidgets” or “runs about or climbs excessively in situations when it is not appropriate.” And for this, children as young as four should be placed on drugs that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration categorizes in the same class of highly addictive drugs as cocaine, morphine and opium?

Right.

It should come as no surprise that the chairman of the new ADHD guidelines, Mark Wolraich, MD, is a periodic consultant to Shire Pharmaceuticals,  Eli Lilly, Shinogi, and Next Wave Pharmaceuticals, or that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has received millions in pharmaceutical funding—In 2011,they received $30,000 from Pfizer; $100,000 from Eli Lilly; and $79,650 from Merck. In 2010, they received $297,750 from Pfizer; $100,000 from Merck; and $3,000 from Shire. Between 2008 and 2009, AAP received another $69,000 from Pfizer. 

This isn’t the first time the AAP has come under fire for promoting a pharmaceutical agenda – in 2008, they were exposed for their  financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, when the academy issued guidelines recommending statins (cholesterol lowering drugs) for kids, after it was disclosed they had received substantial contributions from pharmaceutical companies with ties to statins, including $433,000 from Merck, $835,250 from Abbott Laboratories’ Ross Product Division and $216,000 from the Bristol-Myers Squibb company Mead Johnson Nutritionals.

Here are the only guidelines (also known as facts) that the AAP should be issuing:

1) There is no medical or scientific test that can validate ADHD as a medical condition or disease.  Not one.  Diagnoses is 100% subjective and means nothing in medical terms.

2) 12 International drug regulatory agencies have issued warnings on ADHD drugs such as Ritalin causing depression, insomnia, mania, hallucinations, psychosis, heart attack, stroke and sudden death. The US DEA places Ritalin in the same category of highly addictive drugs as morphine, cocaine and opium.

3) No child should ever be subjected to mind-altering, life threatening drugs based solely on a checklist of behaviors. Period.

 

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US health agency revises conflict of interest rules

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

From Project on Government Oversight:

In recent years, Senator Grassley exposed several academic physicians for taking large amounts of money from companies with a direct financial interest in their research, some of it funded by the NIH. The list reads like a who’s who in academic research:

    • Dr. Charlie Nemeroff, former Chair of the Psychiatry Department at Emory University, who failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from GlaxoSmithKline while researching that same company’s drugs with an NIH grant.  Dr. Nemeroff was bounced from Emory and has now taken over the Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Miami.
    • Dr. Alan Schatzberg, former Chair of the Psychiatry Department at Stanford University received an NIH grant to study a drug while partially owning a company that was seeking FDA approval of said drug. An NIH oversight group recommended that Stanford’s clinical trial on mifepristone be “terminated immediately and permanently.”  The recommendation was made because of concerns over conflicts of interest, patient safety and other issues.
    • Dr. Joseph Biederman and two other researchers at Harvard University failed to report almost a million dollars each in outside income while heading up several NIH grants. Harvard later disciplined the three physicians.

US health agency revises conflict of interest rules

From Reuters – August 23 – 2011

by  Alina Selyukh

WASHINGTON,  – The U.S. National Institutes of Health revised on Tuesday its 16-year-old conflict of interest rules for medical researchers, lowering the amount of money that constitutes a financial conflict and expanding the required disclosures.

The 1995 regulations effectively put responsibility for tracking scientists’ financial conflicts of interest on their universities. The rule required researchers to disclose conflicts to their institutions, which then had to assure the NIH the conflict had been managed, reduced or eliminated.

The new rule extends that requirement so researchers report not only the fact of a conflict of interest, but also its details such as value, specific nature, why it is a conflict and the impact it might have on research.

It lowers the amount a researcher must disclose if received from an industry or held in company stock to $5,000 from about $10,000.

Research institutions, in turn, are now required to report that information to the federal grant-awarding agency alongside details of how the conflicts are managed. Also, before spending any grant money, the institution has to post information about the financial conflicts on a public website.

The new rules will affect about 2,000 organizations that are awarded public health science funding every year and some 38,000 scientists who participate in research funded by these grants and have a “significant financial interest,” NIH said.

Concern about the integrity of research in the United States has grown since 2008, when Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley criticized prominent Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman and others for failing to fully disclose payments from drug companies.

In a more recent example, medical device maker Medtronic Inc (MDT.N) came under fire over accusations that doctors paid by the company had failed to disclose major side effects from a bone growth drug in clinical trials.

A 2009 report by the Institute of Medicine, one of the National Academies of Sciences that advises U.S. policymakers, called on doctors to strictly disclose research funding to strengthen protection against conflicts of interest. The report called for virtually anyone involved in medicine — academic medical centers, journals, professional societies, researchers and doctors — to set up or strengthen conflict of interest guidelines.

From 1996 to 2007, relationships between individual academic researchers and industry nearly doubled, according to a study cited by NIH in its final rule. From 1994 to 2003, the amount of financial support for biomedical research almost tripled to $94.3 billion, with 57 percent of that funding coming from industry sources, according to analysis cited by NIH. (Additional reporting by Anna Yukhananov; editing by Andre Grenon)

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/23/health-science-conflicts-idUSN1E77M1PB20110823

 

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Harvard Medical School Professor Among Five Psychiatrists Accused of Ghostwriting

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

The Harvard Crimson – July 12, 2011

—Staff writer Naveen N. Srivatsa

Photo: Keri D Mabry

A complaint filed with the federal Office of Research Integrity alleged that a group of psychiatrists, including an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School, signed their names to an academic paper written by a communications firm hired by a major pharmaceutical company.

Gary Sachs, a researcher affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of five doctors identified in the formal accusation filed July 8 by University of Pennsylvania professor Jay D. Amsterdam.

The psychiatrists allowed the medical communications company Scientific Therapeutics Information, hired by SmithKline Beecham, to draft a paper using their names, according to the complaint. The paper, according to Amsterdam, suggested that the antidepressant Paxil can help treat some cases of bipolar disorder.

SmithKline Beecham, which has since merged into the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, manufactured Paxil.

The practice known as ghostwriting is widely condemned by scientific journals. The World Association of Medical Editors calls ghostwriting “dishonest and unacceptable.”

The complaint includes messages sent between those affiliated with the study, as well as their supervisors. The attached messages include professors saying that Scientific Therapeutics Information and SmithKline Beecham selected the first author of the paper and failed to provide the paper to all investigators before submission.

But the messages also seem to portray a feud between Amsterdam and University of Pennsylvania Associate Professor Laszlo Gyulai, one of the accused researchers. In one message, Amsterdam accuses him of stealing his research.

“As per your investigation there is little doubt that these data were misappropriated from me and used and published without my knowledge and without regard to the significant contribution that I made to this study,” Amsterdam wrote in an email to Gyulai’s supervisor.

The paper was published in June 2001, and the research was funded by grants from GlaxoSmithKline and the National Institute of Mental Health.

In an interview Wednesday morning, Sachs, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, said that while the relationship between Amsterdam and Gyulai was antagonistic, the accusations of research misconduct should be investigated.

“There might be unhappiness between two faculty memebers, and they might escalate this. But the question is whether there is any basis to this assertion, and this is a very serious assertion,” he said. “So apart from whatever motivations there may be, they did raise assertions, and those assertions deserve to be investigated.”

Sachs said that he was involved in designing the study and that he saw the paper before it was submitted to the journal.

While he said he did not interact with anyone from Scientific Therapeutics International, he did come in contact with employees of the pharamceutical company.

“The idea that bipolar depression was important to study has been an essential part of my career. Encouraging studies in this field is obviously, as an academic, something I’d want to do,” he said. “I was very pleased that they were willing to put their drug to the test. I give them credit of actually having the trial for the drug. Interacting with them in the course of the design and execution of the study, that’d all be standard stuff to do.”

In a statement, GlaxoSmithKline said that employees were involved in the draft’s development and that the company financially supported the study. It said that the primary authors of a paper have final approval of the draft and that when its employees provide “substantive assistance” to a paper, it is disclosed.

“This article was written more than 10 years ago and we do not have details about the development of the manuscript,” a spokesperson said in the statement. “GSK is committed to complete transparency regarding clinical and case studies.”

A spokesperson for the hospital said that it is looking into the complaint.

“Massachusetts General Hospital takes allegations of research misconduct very seriously and will handle the matter in compliance with our policy to determine if there’s any validity to the complaint,” spokesperson Kristen Stanton said in an email.

Sachs said that since the filing of the complaint, he has discussed the matter with a hospital representative.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/7/12/complaint-amsterdam-sachs-glaxosmithkline/

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Doctors’ Conflicting Interests Can Cost Money and Lives, and Hinder Medical Discoveries

Monday, March 28th, 2011

ABC News – March 28, 2011

by Dr. Stefan P. Kruszewski, Psychiatrist

Psychiatrists who pimp for drug companies

The fact that doctors take money from pharmaceutical companies happens to be old news. But this time around, the docs in question come from Stanford University. Previous news stories reported that doctors receiving pharmaceutical funding hailed from Harvard, the University of Miami, the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

More than a few of these doctors are psychiatrists who have received tax-supported, public National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Mental Health funding for clinical research, have participated in U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panels or have appeared on, or on behalf of, various not-for-profit psychiatric advocacy boards — some of which are heavily supported by the manufacturers of psychiatric medications.

In 2006, my colleagues and I wrote a brief letter to the editor to the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of America’s premier peer-reviewed medical journals. Our letter expressed concern about the lack of honest disclosure of conflicts by certain psychiatric authors in a previously published article.

Multiple authors had recommended specific antidepressant therapy but failed to reveal that they were being paid by multiple antidepressant manufacturers to speak, advocate and do research for the companies that sold the drugs.

During the review process, an associate editor at the journal asked the question (and inadvertently copied me on an email that had been sent to another associate editor), “What’s the big deal? What’s all this [expletive deleted] about conflicts of interest?”

Academic journals, heavily supported by advertising money, are biased and complicit in the conflict of interest fiasco.

Sometimes I wonder why I — or anyone else for that matter — should care about psychiatrists who pimp for drug companies. After all, physician spokespeople and drug manufacturers are capitalists, and capitalism is our economic cornerstone. Every day, any financial news consumer hears the refrain invoking the social advantages of free market capitalism. It is the mantra of a major financial television network. And even though I’m a psychiatrist, I’m also a capitalist, so why should I worry?

But I do worry, because drug promotion and clinical decision-making that are brokered on the backs of dollar bills have a greater chance of causing serious adverse outcomes, including illnesses and death. If a physician embellishes the effectiveness of a drug or minimizes its risk, that directly hurts you and me.

Physicians who are heavily supported by pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers are not forming independent, unbiased decisions. Instead, their brains have been lined with gifts, perks and money, which influences their rose-colored opinions.

My psychiatric colleagues are especially vulnerable here. The result is that your mother, your husband or my child can’t make a reliable decision about the risks and benefits of particular drugs. How could they? The prescribing doctors often don’t know the risks and benefits, so how could we be expected to learn what they don’t know?

Conflicts of interest promoted by pharmaceutical manufacturers negatively affect decisions about current and future medical care. That is tragic, because those half-baked recommendations come with a price that no amount of capitalism can justify. It’s simple and ugly: If you or your mom suddenly succumbs to an arrhythmia whose side effects were not appreciated by your doctor because your doctor was misinformed by another doctor serving as the manufacturer’s spokesperson, that is tragic.

I see it virtually every day in my clinical practice: in young men who have breast lesions and abnormal breast development from atypical antipsychotics; in sudden unexpected deaths, or “suds,” from psychiatric drugs in individuals who had no risk factors for sudden death; in tic and dyskinetic movement disorders in kids arbitrarily prescribed stimulants, and the huge weight gain and symptoms of type 2 diabetes in children and young adults who receive a sedative, such as quetiapine, for sleep.

The bad news doesn’t stop with current care. Conflicted clinical research — often done especially by and for a particular psychiatric pharmaceutical manufacturer — whose design and analysis are biased and whose summary and conclusions are misleadingly positive, fracture the backbone of scientific research.

The legacy of fraudulent research lingers for years before it is recognized and repudiated. That effort impedes real progress, wastes time, money and human resources that could be focused on finding real cures to help all of us. And that’s not good for anybody.

Dr. Stefan Kruszewski is an addiction psychiatrist and CEO of Kruszewski & Associates, a Harrisburg, Pa., company that focuses on health care and financial fraud.

Read the article and watch the ABC News video here:  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/medical-conflicts-interest-disaster-patients/story?id=13060973

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Disciplined doctors receiving pharmaceutical funds

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 2010

by Victoria Colliver

About 48 of the more than 1,730 California doctors who received money from pharmaceutical companies over the past 21 months have been the subject of disciplinary action, a database compiled by the investigative news organization ProPublica found.

While that represents less than 3 percent of the California doctors who take pharmaceutical money, the fact that drug companies are paying those doctors – some of whom have multiple disciplinary actions – for their expertise calls into question how closely these companies vet the physicians who serve as the spokespeople for their drugs.

California doctors have received $28.6 million from top pharmaceutical companies since 2009, with at least three physicians collecting more than $200,000 and 36 others making more than $100,000 for promoting drug firm products. That cash flowing from drug companies to doctors has raised ethical concerns from some observers.

“If they’re getting as much money from pharmaceutical companies as they do for being a doctor, what are they really? Are they working for a pharmaceutical company, or are they being a doctor?” asked Lisa Bero, a pharmacy professor at UCSF who studies conflicts of interest in medicine and research.

Bero also questioned why drug companies – which presumably would want medical leaders who could influence prescribing patterns – would use doctors with a history of disciplinary actions.

“Are those really the most influential physicians?” she asked. “I don’t think they’re (the drug companies) on top of this.”

Company payments

Payments to doctors and other health professionals made by Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck, Johnson & Johnson and Cephalon, some of the world’s largest drug companies, added up to more than $281.9 million in 2009 and 2010 nationwide. The figures do not include drug samples, the cost of continuing education programs, and meals brought to doctors’ offices.

In total, 384 of the approximately 17,700 health professionals in the 30 states surveyed who received some money from drug companies in ProPublica’s database, almost all of them physicians, earned more than $100,000 apiece for their promotional and consulting work on behalf of one or more of the seven companies in 2009 through Oct. 19 of this year.

ProPublica found that the seven drug companies paid $6.7 million to 290 doctors who faced disciplinary action or other regulatory sanctions in various states.

San Francisco psychiatrist Karin Hastik, for example, took $168,658 in speaking and consulting fees from Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline since 2009.

But in May, the Medical Board of California placed Hastik on probation for negligence, prescribing drugs without prior examination, and failing to keep adequate records about a patient she had been caring for since 2000. Hastik did not return calls for comment.

Dr. Gerald Sacks, an anesthesiologist with offices in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, was California’s top earner in the database, receiving $249,822 from drug companies since 2009. More than half – $150,097 – came from Pfizer.

In 2003, the state medical board cited Sacks, who did not return calls for comment, for failing to maintain adequate records of a patient he treated for back pain.

Undermining trust

While the disciplinary actions in the database vary greatly – everything from failing to maintain accurate paperwork to sexual misconduct – some experts say the very act of taking large sums of money from pharmaceutical companies raises ethical concerns.

“It undermines the trust in the doctor-patient relationship,” said Maryann O’Sullivan, executive director for the Campaign for Effective Patient Care, a nonprofit based in Fairfax. O’Sullivan said patients shouldn’t have to worry if their doctors are making medication recommendations because they are beholden to drug company money.

Officials for several of the pharmaceutical firms told ProPublica that they intended to tighten and improve their selection and screening processes in light of the disciplinary results. ProPublica provided each company with lists of all speakers who had been disciplined in the 30 states and by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

A survey conducted in 2004 found that more than 80 percent of physicians had some relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, ranging from accepting drug samples to collecting consulting fees and participating in paid clinical trials.

Since that time, greater attention has been placed on the relationship between doctors and drug companies, and many hospitals and medical schools have adopted rules that limit these ties.

A survey published this month in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that more than 80 percent of doctors still had industry relationships, but the level of involvement had decreased. For example, the survey found the percentage of physicians receiving payment for speaking engagements and other services dropped from more than one-fourth in 2004 to 14.1 percent last year.

Several doctors who were not the subject of any disciplinary action but did take large sums from pharmaceutical companies told The Chronicle they spoke on behalf of only those drugs they believed in and thought they were performing an important educational service for other physicians.

A teaching tool

Dr. Rona Hu, clinical associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, said she earned more money from speaking engagements in 2009 than usual because several drugs she prescribes became available for new uses. The psychiatrist said she has since stopped getting paid by drug firms to speak because Stanford tightened its policy regarding industry gifts to staff.

One of the top earners in Northern California, Palo Alto psychiatrist Manoj Waikar, who earned $185,875 since 2009, ended his affiliation with Stanford as an adjunct professor after the school extended its ban to adjunct staff in March.

“Speaking for drug companies is a great vehicle for me for teaching. I end up reaching more people who are eager to learn, especially in rural parts of the country,” he said, adding he does not disclose what drugs he prescribes to pharmaceutical companies so they hire him for his expertise, not because of his prescribing patterns. “As much as I loved teaching at Stanford, abiding by their rules would (keep) me from teaching as many people in as many ways as I can.”

Dr. Michael Lenoir of Oakland, who collected $112,600 from GlaxoSmithKline, said he uses his speaking engagements to visit urban and underserved areas around the country to discuss the high rate of asthma in black communities and the treatment options.

A San Francisco pain doctor who has earned $176,771 since 2009 from Pfizer and Cephalon said he doesn’t believe speaking for drug companies poses a conflict because he discloses the payments to his patients.

“So far, every patient has been OK with it,” said Dr. Wayne Anderson, adding that doctors who take money from equipment manufacturers and other medical suppliers don’t fall under the same scrutiny. “I don’t get bonus payments at the end of the month. I’m not trying to do anything secretive. I have complete transparency and honesty, and I tell people when I have been paid to promote a drug.”

About this story: It was produced in partnership with ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization. To read the stories in the investigation and to search the ProPublica database on pharmaceutical company payments to doctors, go to projects.propublica.org/docdollars.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/18/MNJU1GDLRF.DTL

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From Psychobabble to Biobabble: How drug money has come to dominate psychiatry

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

MinnPost.com
By Susan Perry
April 15, 2010

This month’s Lancet contains a short, romping, and highly readable essay on the history of psychiatry. It’s written by Andrew Scull, professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, who has steeped himself in the topic for four decades.

Scull talks about how psychiatry has revolutionized itself during the span of his career. The Freudian movement dominated the field through the 1960s — a period, he notes, when mental illnesses like schizophrenia were often attributed to such now discredited causes as the “refrigerator mother.”

Then, “more swiftly and silently than the Cheshire cat, psychoanalytic hegemony vanished,” writes Scull. Its replacement: drugs, the “new Holy Grail of the profession.”

But has this Holy Grail turned out to be yet another false icon? Here’s Scull’s scathing conclusion:

The US National Institute of Mental Health proclaimed the 1990s “the decade of the brain.” A simplistic biological reductionism increasingly ruled the psychiatric roost. Patients and their families learned to attribute mental illness to faulty brain biochemistry, defects of dopamine, or a shortage of seratonin. It was biobabble as deeply misleading and unscientific as the psychobabble it replaced, but as marketing copy it was priceless. Meantime, the psychiatric profession was seduced and bought off with boatloads of research funding. Where once shrinks had been the most marginal of medical men, existing in a twilight zone on the margins of professional respectability, now they were the darlings of medical school deans, the millions upon millions of their grants and indirect cost recoveries helping to finance the expansion of the medical-industrial complex.

And so to scandal. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and to a quite extraordinary extent, drug money has come to dominate psychiatry. It underwrites psychiatric journals and psychiatric conferences (where the omnipresence of pharmaceutical loot startles the naive outsider). It makes psychiatric careers, and many of those whose careers it fosters become shills for their paymasters, zealously promoting lucrative off-label uses for drugs whose initial approval for prescription was awarded on quite other grounds.

Read entire article:  http://www.minnpost.com/healthblog/2010/04/15/17392/from_psychobabble_to_biobabble_how_drug_money_has_come_to_dominate_psychiatry

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Psychiatrists And Pharma: Undue Influence? Concern about corruption increasing…

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Pharmalot
By Ed Silverman
March 25, 2010

Two essays published in separate periodicals this week raise troubling questions about the extent to which psychiatrists may be unduly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, and how this relationship may effect public trust in psychiatry. The upshot? The concern about corruption, or at least the appearance of corruption is palpable. Sigmund Freud would not be pleased. Interestingly, one of the authors is Tom Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

For instance, Lisa Cosgrove and Harold Bursztajn write in Psychiatric Times that they looked at the two philanthropic arms of the American Psychiatric Association – the American Psychiatric Foundation and the American Psychiatric Institute for Research and Education – and found that APF’s 15-member board includes four high-level pharma execs that either make meds recommended by APA or are developing products targeted to treat mental disorders. Other board members include two more with industry ties and a senior vp at Fleishman Hillard, the public relations firm whose clients include six drugmakers.

APF’s corporate advisory council lists drugmakers, they continue, that contribute “significant funding” to APF and that make meds recommended in the APA’s clinical practice guidelines. Although it was not possible to discern the total amount of industry funding given to APF, in fiscal year 2008 APF lists 11 pharmaceutical companies and 1 medical device manufacturer that contributed monies; 6 of the companies are listed as giving $40,000 “and above” per year.

They go on to write that APIRE, like APF, doesn’t require disclosure of financial conflicts of interests, and that nine of 16 APIRE board members have ties to drugmakers. They also note current disclosure policies don’t require reporting of pooled industry money to academic departments, units, hospitals, and med schools. And because there is no independent monitoring of industry ties, they maintain “underreporting is very likely a problem. For example, one board member who reported ‘no disclosure’ in an APA publication was found to be on the speakers’ bureau of multiple pharmaceutical companies.”

Read entire article:  http://www.pharmalot.com/2010/03/psychiatrists-and-pharma-undue-influence/

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Citing public’s growing distrust of psychiatry, NIMH Chief says psychiatry must “Clean up our act”

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

FiercePharma
By Tracy Staton
March 24, 2010

Is the new Journal of the American Medical Association a special issue on reform? It doesn’t stop with its demands for new publication standards. It’s also showcasing a rallying cry from National Institute of Mental Health Director Dr. Thomas Insel, who calls on his fellow psychiatrists to “clean up our act.”

In Insel’s estimation, psychiatry has grown too close to drugmakers. All the money flowing from pharma to psychiatrists and psychiatric researchers has created a “culture of influence,” he says, and psychiatrists need to rise above all that. He wants all financial ties between drugmakers and psychiatry to be disclosed, and for psychiatrists to take a step back from branded meds in favor of generic drugs and non-drug treatments such as talk therapy.

This is far from the first call for change in psychiatry. Over the past three years, congressional probes have repeatedly highlighted influential psychiatrists’ financial relationships with industry. In some cases, payments from drugmakers went undisclosed even though researchers were obliged to report them to their universities.

- read the JAMA extract

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Sen Grassley’s bill now requires public disclosure of ALL Pharma $$ to doctors— Top Psychiatrist calls for “Ethics Cleanup”

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Associated Press
Carla K. Johnson
March 23, 2010

American psychiatrists need to break away from a “culture of influence” created by their financial dealings with the drug industry, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health said in a leading medical journal.

Dr. Thomas Insel stops short of calling researchers corrupt or asking them to stop taking money from drug companies. But he highlights a “bias in prescribing practices” that favors brand names drugs over cheaper generics and non-drug treatments. And he says the situation must change with new standards for transparency and full disclosure of psychiatry’s collaborations with industry.

“We can show the rest of medicine how to clean up our act,” Insel told The Associated Press. His commentary appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

His efforts got a boost Tuesday with the signing of the health care overhaul legislation which requires drugmakers and others to file annual reports to the government on their financial ties to doctors. The law requires reporting of gifts, entertainment, food, research money and other fees and grants. Consumer advocates applaud the “sunshine” provision because it also requires a database the public can search for their own doctors’ ties to industry.

“Transparency is the first step toward giving patients and the public the tools they need to evaluate those relationships,” said Allan Coukell, director of the Pew Prescription Project, a consumer health project of the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.

Current National Institutes of Health rules on financial disclosure are confusing, Insel said. They allow researchers seeking federal funds to make their own judgments about what constitutes a significant financial interest, which they must report to their academic or research institutions. The rules also exempt disclosures of anything below $10,000 annually or 5 percent equity interest in a company. Insel is helping oversee a revision of the NIH’s rules, which date back to 1995.

Industry pays for much of the medical research in the United States and many scientists have financial relationships with drug and device makers. Researchers at many institutions are expected to fully disclose those ties to their universities, to the NIH and to the medical journals that publish their research.

Beginning in 2008, an inquiry by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, uncovered millions of dollars in unreported fees paid by drug industry to prominent researchers. The investigation prompted universities and NIH to reassess their conflict-of-interest policies.

When the Grassley inquiry accused seven psychiatrists of failing to report payments they received from drug companies, Insel, himself a psychiatrist, said he tried to determine whether psychiatrists were being targeted unfairly.

He found, instead, evidence that psychiatry may have more drug ties than other medical specialties. In Vermont, for example, which requires public disclosure of industry payments to doctors, psychiatrists receive more money from drug companies than do other types of doctors.

Psychiatric journals report slightly higher rates of industry funding of published studies than other medical journals. And one study found that 90 percent of the advisers who help write American Psychiatric Association guidelines had undisclosed financial ties to industry, Insel writes in JAMA.

Read entire article:  http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i0eFhYRg8tB3fLeCNO4Ka1IXc_9wD9EKIA103

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How Vested Interests Created the Perfect Marketing/Lobbying Machine: Mental Health “Advocacy” Groups—Funded by Pharma

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

by CCHR International

An ongoing U.S. Senate investigation headed by Senator Charles Grassley has  sought disclosure of pharmaceutical funding paid to researchers, physicians,  medical schools and medical journals.  Some of the nation’s most prominent psychiatrists have now been exposed for extensive conflicts of interest amounting to millions in undisclosed pharmaceutical funding, including Dr. Charles Nemeroff, Dr. Joseph Biederman, Dr. Melissa DelBello, Dr. Timothy Wilens, Dr. Thomas Spencer, Dr. Alan Schatzberg, Dr. Martin Keller, Dr. A. John Rush, Dr. Karen Wagner, Dr. Jeffrey Bostic and Dr. Frederick Goodwin — many of which serve as advisory board members to mental illness “advocacy groups” which are now also the subject of the Senate investigation for their undisclosed pharmaceutical funding.

The majority of the public may or may not be familiar with these so-called mental health advocacy organizations, such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) or the myriad of bipolar, depression or ADHD “support groups” that are inundating the internet.

But they need to be.

These are groups operating under the guise of advocates for the “mentally ill,” which in reality are heavily funded pharmaceutical front groups – lobbying and working on state and federal laws which effect the entire nation — from our elderly in nursing homes to our military, pregnant women, nursing mothers and school children. Presenting themselves as patient advocacy groups is highly disingenuous not only to their membership, many of which may have a sincere desire to help a loved one or a family member with mental problems, but to legislators, the press and the American public — for they have consistently lobbied for legislation that benefits the mental health and pharmaceutical industries which fund them, and not patients they claim to represent.

Certainly any organization claiming to be for the rights of patients diagnosed mentally ill would have as their primary goal, full informed consent in the field of mental health – including full and complete disclosure of all drug risks, the right to refuse treatment, the right to know that psychiatric diagnoses are not medical conditions (evident by the fact there is not one confirmatory medical/scientific test). Above all such groups would provide patients with an abundance of information on non-harmful, non- drug, medical solutions and options considering the dangerous and well documented risks of psychiatric drugs by international drug regulatory agencies.

These groups do not.

A patients rights group for the mentally ill would never endorse something as absurd and obviously dangerous as giving electroshock to pregnant women, nor condone schools being able to require children to take a psychiatric drug as a condition of attending school. Furthermore, they would never be opposed to the FDA actually doing its job and finally issuing long overdue warnings that antidepressants can cause children to commit suicide, or issue warnings that ADHD drugs have serious and even deadly side effects. Yet these are just some of the actions condoned and promoted by these so-called patients rights groups.

As another example take the federally proposed bill, The Mothers Act; a previous version of this bill called on using a method of “screening” pregnant women and new mothers called EPDS, a screening method documented to triple the number of women diagnosed with Postpartum depression, according to a study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology. The Scandinavian Journal of Public Health stated that EPDS screening was unethical and should not be used. None of the so called advocacy groups for the mentally ill had any objections to this bill whatsoever, or endorsing such an unethical screening tool. They supported it. The bill would have passed with no objections from them whatsoever, if not for the dedication of real advocacy groups with no vested interests (ties to Pharma) opposing language in this bill that would have led to women being falsely diagnosed and put on dangerous psychiatric drugs to “treat” them, unnecessarily placing new mothers and their infants at great risk.

To put it simply, these groups are not what they appear to be. Yet their influence over legislation, lobbying, drug regulation (or lack thereof), and public relations campaigns is substantial and effects the entire nation. For they claim to be the voice of the “mentally ill.” But are they? Or are they the result of a brilliant marketing/lobbying campaign designed to benefit the industry that funds them—the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry.

To find out how it all started click here: http://www.cchrint.org/psycho-pharmaceutical-front-groups/

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