Dr. David Healy

Psychiatrist. Psychopharmacologist. Scientist. Author.

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The tricks that drug companies do live after them, their patients are oft interred with their trials

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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 … [Read more...] about The tricks that drug companies do live after them, their patients are oft interred with their trials

Where Were The Adults?

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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? Black box warning on pediatric use of antidepressants In 2004, following the lead of the British Regulator (MHRA), the FDA put a Black Box … [Read more...] about Where Were The Adults?

Heads We Win, Tails You Lose

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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 … [Read more...] about Heads We Win, Tails You Lose

Burn in Hell

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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 … [Read more...] about Burn in Hell

Psychotic Doubt

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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 … [Read more...] about Psychotic Doubt

The Bureaucrat That Didn’t Bark

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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 … [Read more...] about The Bureaucrat That Didn’t Bark

Drug Companies Use Studies the Way a Drunk Uses a Lamppost

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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, … [Read more...] about Drug Companies Use Studies the Way a Drunk Uses a Lamppost

Welcome to Data Based Medicine

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Adverse drug events are now the fourth leading cause of death in hospitals It’s a reasonable bet they are an even greater cause of death in non-hospital settings where there is no one to monitor things going wrong and no one to intervene to save a life. In mental health for instance drug-induced problems are the leading cause of death — and these deaths happen in community … [Read more...] about Welcome to Data Based Medicine