‘Evidence’ is what the French call a false friend. You think you understand the word but you don’t. In French or Dutch, the Evidence in Evidence Based Medicine means that something is self-evident – as in using a parachute when jumping from a plane or penicillin for septicemia or an antipsychotic to tranquilize. You don’t need a clinical trial to work out what the right thing … [Read more...] about False Friends
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Petra’s Story: Cymbalta
This piece is the first of a series showing people struggling with the Kafkka-esque absurdities of modern healthcare. It is written anonymously. If you'd like to share your story, please contact us. — David Healy A little over two years ago my daughter’s partner was killed in a tragic accident while in the company of my son. Naturally, this caused terrible grief and sadness … [Read more...] about Petra’s Story: Cymbalta
We Need Data for Data Based Medicine
One of the purposes of this blog is to invite colleagues to add to the knowledge base on drug groups. To submit a paper or to provide your comments, please contact us. I'll start the ball rolling with the following draft Data Based Medicine (DBM) papers: Antidepressants for Takers Antidepressants for Prescribers We have draft papers in preparation on: Mood … [Read more...] about We Need Data for Data Based Medicine
Coincidence a Fine Thing
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 … [Read more...] about Coincidence a Fine Thing
The tricks that drug companies do live after them, their patients are oft interred with their trials
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?
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
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
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
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
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