A follow-up letter to FDA Commissioner, Andrew vonEschenbach RE: Thomas Laughren, FDA’s ‘s Director of Psychiatry Products who has been actively promoting psychotropic drugs–even penning his name to ghostwritten industry-sponsored articles and consensus panels.
Complaint about a surge of FDA administrative approvals for expanded use of highly toxic antipsychotic drugs for children. Approvals were determined by Dr. Thomas Laughren after secret deliberations–without disclosure of scientific data, without an advisory panel or open public discussion.
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.
Latest Huckstersm: Surgical Implants for Depression – NYT Sat, 21 May 2005 The FDA was supposed to protect the public from snake oil hucksterism. It is appalling to note how far the FDA’s approval process for drugs and devices has veered away from it’s 1962 standards of evidence-based medicine. [1]…
TeenScreen: Who Pays for Treatment and Drugs?? Sun, 29 May 2005 In her latest examination of the President’s Commission on Mental Health recommendation for universal mental health screening, Evelyn Pringle focuses on the $$$ it costs and on how screening, followed by prescribing psychotropic drugs, is bankrupting of public health…
Senate Finance Committee Investigating FDA brain stimulation device approval – WSJ Thu, 19 May 2005 Another major scandal is erupting about FDA’s approval decisions that contradict its medical officer’s safety concerns. The Senate Finance Committee is investigating what led the FDA to suddenly reverse its disapproval of Cyberonics’ brain stimulation…
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…
Psychiatry’s most powerful and influential key opinion leaders who belong to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) have been caught off guard. The ACNP leadership is scrambling to overcome the scorn it has received following public disclosure about multiple breaches of ethics and professional standards of conduct. The College and…
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.
A notice from The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the inner sanctum of biological–predominantly drug-centered psychiatry–informs the
membership of the resignation of Dr. Charles Nemeroff, the Editor-in-Chief of its journal, Neuropsychopharmacology.
The harm done by journals’ failure to protect the integrity of science can hardly be overstated.
Today’s New York Times editorial hits the mark–it’s right on target!
