This post was written by Alan Cassels and first appeared in Focus magazine online in early March. The full version is here. Alan was one of the creators of the Selling Sickness, or disease mongering idea. His recent book is "Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease. There is an editorial comment below. A year ago this month - March 28, 2012, to be exact. British … [Read more...]

There used to be a wonderful cartoon series called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat, which led me 25 years ago to give a talk at a British Association for Psychopharmacology meeting entitled 101 Uses for a Dead Psychiatrist. That was back in the days when Psychopharmacology meetings were places of debate and the British Journal of Psychiatry was guaranteed to have something of real interest in every issue. … [Read more...]

At the European Medicines’ Agency meeting held on November 22nd convened to look at the issue of Access to Clinical Trial Data, the pharmaceutical companies came armed with an approach signaled a few weeks earlier by GSK’s Andrew Witty (see Won't get Fooled Again). The industry panelists came from Lilly and UCB along with a representative from EurorDis Francois Houyez. Possibly for the … [Read more...]

Won’t get fooled again outlined a stunning propaganda coup by GSK. On the back of a campaign for open access to clinical trial data that has drawn its inspiration from efforts by the Cochrane Tamiflu reviewers to get access to Roche’s clinical trial data, Andrew Witty came out and proclaimed that GSK were all in favor of access to clinical trial data. The BMJ threw its hat in the air and said … [Read more...]

On November 22nd the European Medicines’ Agency (EMA) is holding a workshop on access to the data from clinical trials. While there have been many efforts by many people over the years to make the clinical trial process more transparent, the EMA workshop has come about primarily following the efforts of Peter Goetsche of the Danish Cochrane Group and Peter Doshi and Tom Jefferson from another … [Read more...]

Three weeks ago What would Batman do Now covered the issue of suicide in the military – an issue that had Batman missing in action, and the Joker suffering the adverse effects of psychotropic drugs. Then along came James Holmes to the premiere of Dark Knight Rises in Aurora. Most drugs that can cause suicide, including the antidepressants, mood-stabilizers, antipsychotics, smoking cessation … [Read more...]

Johanna Ryan in her post Dependence Day points to serious problems linked to psychotropic drug use in the military and what seem to be recent alarming developments, but there is a 60 year history here. In the 1950s, the VA hospital system commissioned Norman Farberow to look at rising rates of suicides among veterans. He studied veterans hospitalized for either medical or psychiatric conditions … [Read more...]

This is the last of 3 posts laying out the philosophical basis for Rxisk.org which will be live in the next few weeks. The others are Cri de Coeur & Once is Never. In his masterpiece on love and life The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera faces us with a dilemma about the important things in life “einmal ist keinmal” – “once is never”. Academics need lovers But Kundera … [Read more...]

This is the second of 3 posts laying out the philosophical basis for Rxisk.org which will be live in the next few weeks. The others are Cri de coeur & the Unbearable lightness of being. In Cri du Coeur I outlined a scenario in which a treatment that causes suicide when put into good trials without any manipulation of the data, any statistical artifice, or any ghostwriting might give rise to a … [Read more...]

This is the first of 3 posts laying out the philosophical basis for Rxisk.org which will be live in the next few weeks. The others are Once is Never & the Unbearable lightness of being. “[I suggest] a meeting with yourself and your reviewers. I have spoken in public on these issues and offered to speak on any platform. I’ve visited the MHRA [British equivalent of FDA]. Part of my … [Read more...]

Coincidence can be a fine thing. No sooner had I finished The tricks that drug companies do live after them, asking for examples of maneuvers to add to a generally available repository of tricks, than up pops Robert Gibbons' paper, Suicidal Thoughts and Behavior With Antidepressant Treatment, with not one but two maneuvers and reminders of others.‎ Dangerous liaisons First off, the reminders. … [Read more...]

One of the hopes of this blog is to create a repository of maneuvers through which clinical trials can be gamed to get results. The series of posts laying out some of the less well known tricks are filed under the Hiding the Bodies blog category. To be more generally useful, this repository needs others to contribute further maneuvers to make it comprehensive and to contribute examples from … [Read more...]

Along with Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline (see Drug companies use studies the way a drunk uses a lamppost), Pfizer created ghost suicidal acts on placebo. Other companies did further things that concealed the suicide problem. Did Pfizer? In 2004, following the lead of the British Regulator (MHRA), the FDA put a Black Box warning about the risk of suicide on the pediatric use of antidepressants. The … [Read more...]

In the late 1980s, Eli Lilly, when faced with an excess of suicidal behaviors in Prozac trials, set up a trial of Prozac in an interesting group of patients. These patients had what is often called borderline personality disorder or intermittent brief depressive disorder or recurrent brief depressive disorder. The trial terminated early. Placebo was sweepingly statistically superior to Prozac. … [Read more...]

In my last post, Psychotic doubt, we saw the most successful maneuver that has ever been devised for hiding dead bodies and silencing us when we are injured. We saw a mechanism that acts like the authority of a psychoanalyst (when Freud was still in vogue), or an ecclesiastical authority (until recently), to silence dissent and cause someone who has been abused to doubt their sanity and blame … [Read more...]

Toward the end of the 1990s, hiding the suicide risk on antidepressants by unearthing ghost suicides and suicidal acts from the early washout phase of trials looks like it might have seemed to company and FDA officials as problematic as Macbeth’s invitation to Banquo to make sure he came back to the feast later that evening. A new strategy came to the fore. Again one of the earliest versions of … [Read more...]

Prozac’s commercial success after its launch in 1987 spurred SmithKline Beecham, Pfizer, and others to bring Paxil (Seroxat, Deroxat, Aropax), Zoloft (Lustral), and other Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to market. En route there was the tricky problem of managing what was recognized within companies by the early 1980s but denied in public, namely, that these drugs could cause … [Read more...]

Drug companies use studies the way a drunk uses a lamppost — for support rather than illumination. This quote adapted from English romcom author Jilly Cooper (who adapted it from others before her) seems an appropriate preface for a series of company approaches to data handling that have concealed rather than revealed treatment-induced problems. In another galaxy, far, far away, somewhere in … [Read more...]