Legislation is needed to ensure that conflicts of interest rules in medicine are enforced. One method for reigning in the abuse is to prohibit government grant awards to any researcher who violates financial conflict of interest rules.
"Some politicians, public health officials, mental health activists and pharmaceutical companies have worked to establish mental-health screening programs in schools and the community….Researchers and clinicians, meanwhile, say they are far from having developed accurate predictors of a child developing depression. The younger the child, the murkier the crystal ball."
"Academic officials acknowledged in the published guidelines that Lilly gave more than 90 percent of $861,000 in grants for the campaign and medical recommendations. About a fifth of the 46 guidelines writers acknowledged previously taking money from Eli Lilly for speaking, consulting or research."
Below the New York Times provides a summary of Crawford's selective disclosure and concealment of his financial holdings while he was
Commissioner, noting Crawford's ignoble tenure:
The battle lines were drawn between those who recognize the corrosive effect that the pharmaceutical industry is having on the safety and integrity of medicine and medical research, and the powerful stakeholders–the pharmaceutical-academic industrial complex.
Two especially timely conferences focus on MEDICINE AND THE LAW:
Success in academic psychiatry is not measured in the improvement of patients' mental health, but rather in quantifiable commercial tender.How many grants one brings to the university, how many publications one churns out each year, and how many corporate and professional advisory boards one serves on–and how much money one…
"This is really an ethical Potemkin village, where a hollow system appears to provide the illusion of integrity, but transgressors never leave."
Stanford University announced that it is adopting a strict conflicts of interest policy.
The Los Angeles Times has uncovered yet additional evidence of financial misconduct and corrupt practices at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
To gain understanding as to why lethal drugs pass FDA review, read the front page article in The Wall Street Journal (below) describing the transformation of the FDA from watchdog to lapdog.
A follow-up to news reports about the conflict of interest scandal that has engulfed not only Dr. Charles Nemeroff, former president and editor in chief of the official journal of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, but the College itself.
