The following is my article originally published in Ethical Times (No. 16, Fall 2008), the bulletin of the Program in Medicine and Human Values at California Pacific Medical Center. Since this piece appeared, PhRMA has voluntarily suspended the distribution of branded items and certain food gifts to doctors (see my post). The ethical argument still […]
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Happy 2009! As promised, I’ll start adding photos to brighten up the page, and maybe illustrate a point at times. This one is a mid-winter tribute to spring. As you might surmise from past posts, I have long-standing concerns about commercial influence on the practice of medicine generally, and psychiatry in particular. I have two […] A psychiatric revolution began in the late 1950s with the marketing of Thorazine, the first neuroleptic (antipsychotic) medication. Thorazine and similar drugs quelled psychotic agitation and quieted auditory hallucinations (voices). This allowed large numbers of state-hospital patients to be “de-institutionalized,” i.e., released to the community. While the ultimate promise of this revolution was broken in […] In my last post, I wrote about how the pharmaceutical industry funds half of the continuing medical education (CME) of doctors, and the risk this may pose for bias in what doctors learn. The influence of industry money on health education goes far beyond this, though. In 2004 I learned first-hand how insidious this influence […] On October 3rd the New York Times reported that several prominent research psychiatrists are under Congressional investigation for failing to report income derived from consulting and speaking for pharmaceutical companies. One of the field’s most renowned and prolific researchers, Charles B. Nemeroff MD of Emory University, stands accused of concealing over $1 million since 2000, […] |
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