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Last week’s post introduced “neo-culturalism“. This post might add to the sense of what’s at stake and why there is a need for Samizdat – and your input to help us all work out how to grapple with what is going wrong.
Two decades ago, the editors of journals were people with what was once – way back in the 1960s – called bottom. Maybe this was a British thing. It applied to men who had reached middle years and whose bottoms had begun to spread and with this spread came what was viewed as a certain maturity of judgment – a time when men didn’t feel compelled to become Mamils (middle-aged med in Lycra, on bikes or in gyms).
Breaking Bad
Figures like Robin Fox, the editor the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM). There were whippersnappers like Richards Horton (Lancet) and Smith (BMJ) coming up behind him, figures of some substance but perhaps not quite the same.
Early in the crisis about children and antidepressants, I sent a paper about SSRIs and children to Robin Fox, who replied:
Nearly six weeks have passed since you sent me the paper on SSRIs in children. I spent two of them in contemplation, two of them taking outside advice, and the last two wondering how to proceed. The difficulty lies in the mixture of review and polemic. For clinicians in search of good advice, the accusatory element will be off-putting. In reviews of published work, many commentators nowadays warn about commercial influences, which have been demonstrated statistically by the likes of J.V.; but questions of greed and cynical disregard for human life need to be discussed in a different context. I suspect that you could write a brilliant article about ghost writing and kindred behaviour, but this is not it. In my editorial career I have always been suspicious of the pharmaceutical industry – and the question of ghost writing was raised during my editorship of the Lancet – but I have found that medical readers do not relish the fire and brimstone approach. My external reviewer, an academic child psychiatrist, took a similar view. He reckoned that the review should be rewritten, with evidence for and against throughout and minus the direct accusations of immoral behaviour. Whatever you do, I think that you should describe and leave to others to judge.
I fished out this 2003 article to check out just how shrill this young man had been – Here. It was worth the dig.
A few years before I had liaised at length with Richards Smith and Horton attempting to get articles published outlining the development of the SSRI and suicide crisis. Smith was blunter than Fox – ultimately saying we will never publish anything you send us.
Journal editors are essentially part of the establishment – the culture. Fox had a friendlier tone and was more judicious in his choice of words. Perhaps he had a less guilty conscience than Smith, who had approved and supported the Beasley article exonerating Prozac from charges of suicide.
Whatever you think is going on, a smelly figure (breaking bad) with warts and a personality was making the call at the other end of the correspondence. If you were disgusted, you knew what face to put on the voodoo doll as you prepared the pins.
Controlled Odour
A decade later, big-name journals with less high-profile editors, supported by an editorial team, might ask for a review of an article but now after submitting a review, if I’d raised any concerns, I’d find the article coming back to me for re-review. It was (and is) only when the reviewers signed off on the article that it would be published. There was a vacuum where the editor had been.
Asking if there is anyone at home, draws a response that its not the editor’s job to make decisions – it’s the reviewers.
Journals began to get online review systems with automatic dropdowns offering reject, accept with major revision, accept with minor revision, accept as is – but no “editor to decide” option. Previously you knew you were dealing with a great editor if in the face of three negative reviews of the article, he still decided to publish.
In the case of the BMJ, a review team now sits where Richard Smith once sat. Chances are there is someone on the team dead set against publication of an article on antidepressants and children, whatever the reviews, but you’ll never find out whose face to put on the voodoo doll. If the reviewers haven’t killed the article, authors get told about the boxes that have just not been ticked.
Almost odourless.
Odour Free
We now have platforms, where we once had bottoms. A topic gets picked by a company like Frontiers who own a platform. They look around for editors to help put together an issue on the now sure-fire topic like antidepressants in children.
The editors approach academics they know to write articles on some aspect of the topic. An exciting portfolio of articles and authors takes shape on an important topic. Deadlines are set for submission of articles and final publication etc.
Then things begin to go wrong.
Some background information is needed here to make sense of what begins to go wrong.
The peer review process is distinctly last millennium. Reviewers don’t get paid. Sometimes they do the job out of love, sometimes out of hate and the chance to pay back some grudge.
Authors don’t get paid when their article gets published. They get their kicks out of someone citing their article and it may help them in the academic pecking order.
Old-style editors like Robin Fox used to get paid a pittance. If you were running something like the BMJ business, you had a fulltime job.
The rhythm of twentieth century academic life involved keeping several balls in the air and focusing on one of them, like a review, only when necessary. Into this rhythm a Frontier’s algorithm now comes asking for a review of a submitted article – right now. Maybe you ignore it for a bit – reviews are never urgent. The requests keep coming to both editors and reviewers and multiply if the editor is responsible for several articles.
Its not possible to feed the beast without dropping something else because it’s not just a matter of clicking a proforma note to be sent to some anonymous reviewer, or as a reviewer it’s not just a quick skim of an article, there are all sorts of administrative issues that now go with reviewing – boxes to be ticked at every step, regular requests to reconfirm your inside leg measurement. Think automated call centres that loop back to some automatic question you’ve already answered and then cut you off without explanation.
Lyon 1840
This is fast forward to Lyon in 1840. Machines had begun to appear that could do a quicker job than the hand-weavers of cotton, wool or silk. The machine garments did not have the same variety and were not tailor made, but they could be produced at speed and in bulk, so machine owners could undercut the price traditional weavers were offering. Low wages or no wages became the only options.
The weavers protested. The new way of working meant moving out of their homes, breaking up family life, being crowded into factory settings, chained to a timetable and ending up with less money.
In 1840 Louis Villerme mapped out the health effects of the new factory working and depressed wages on the workers – they were getting new diseases, and injuries but also suffering because they could no longer afford decent food. Villerme and other doctors at the time sided with the workers and their research on occupational health led to the formation of a communist party in Lyon in 1840.
The brewing discontent led to a Revolution in France in 1848. Spotting a bandwagon to jump on, Marx thought communism was the coming thing and rushed out his Communist Manifesto. But the Revolution failed. The communists emigrated to Illinois – south west of where Chicago would later be.
Fifty years later, Chicago’s meatpacking industry repeated the trick pioneered by the silk factory owners, putting butchers and the local processing of meat out of business across the United States. In response to a growing labor unrest, in 1906 the US government put a Food and Drugs Act in place as part of an effort to placate the workers and a new class – consumers.
The New Nowhere
Now the platform has arrived in the middle of medical publishing. After the editors and authors do tons of work, any of the authors who wants to get published, (including the editors if they happen to have written something), gets charged $3000 to have their article published. For some academics, this will be paid for by their university (you the public in the case of most universities) but for others it won’t. There can be waivers which will drop the price to something closer to $1000 but the bottom line is that publication makes someone who has done no work, has no idea what the content of the articles means and probably no interest, a lot of money.
Someone whose only interest is in the ticked boxes that show they are producing a quality product.
One or two people who know nothing about medicine can make the system turn a profit for the organisation. Telling the platformers this is enslavement doesn’t compute. There is nobody at home to engage with the idea of slavery.
In the course of a decade the Frontiers Operation claims to have grown to be the 5th most cited academic publisher in the world.
Samizdat
Samizdat is anti-Frontiers, anti-platforms and anti-metrics. It embraces smells, messiness and a human touch. Its about not leaving you dead in your car while the parking ticket boxes get ticked.
But it is not about going back to the twentieth century and being co-opted by an establishment. The establishment is now or soon will be a platform, an algorithm. We have to find a way to make things happen within relationships such that to adapt an old saying “A Friend supported by a Friend has the strength of a Walled City”.
As Challenging Health Totalitarianism put it Samizdat is about finding something more complex than a Middle Ground.
Some of the good guys trying to roll back whatever it is that is going wrong, talk about conflicts of interest – abolish these and all will be okay. This is not wrong, anymore than platforms are inherently wrong, but in their efforts to become odour-free campaigns against conflicting interests risk becoming just like platforms – sterile.
The key thing is how do we get to objectivity. Removing all conflicting interests isn’t the way anymore than using platforms is. Objectivity comes when conflicting interests are invited into a room and let engage – we need more not less conflict of interest. But at the moment only one set of interests get heard.
BMJ (company)
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BMJ
Parent company British Medical Association
Founded 1840
Country of origin United Kingdom
Headquarters location London
Publication types Medical journals
Nonfiction topics Medicine
No. of employees 480
Official website bmj.com/company
BMJ (branded as BMJ Group until 2013)[1] is a provider of journals, clinical decision support, events and medical education. The company, legally the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association. Established in 1840 with the publication of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal (later the first edition of the British Medical Journal), it is now a fully commercial organisation with about 550 staff and offices in several locations around the world.
The company’s products and services also extend to offer rights and licensing, targeted advertising and sponsorship opportunities for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, recruiters, and the general medical community.
It is possible to edit this entry – shall we?
I would highlight the last 2 paragraphs above and issue a warning that no longer should this publication be viewed as an informative medical journal. It is now a commercial enterprise whose raison d’étre is profit.
Just to add ANYBODY member of the public, whoever. can edit the entries in Wikipidia It is easy to do and names neednt be added but can be. Wikipidia itself has given a good clue where to start – and this is actually quite unusual.
but I have found that medical readers do not relish the fire and brimstone approach.
Whatever you do, I think that you should describe and leave to others to judge.
But, the others find it hard to judge – and in other words, don’t make waves, don’t cause ripples and certainly don’t cause anyone else to have to think…
Shrilliness; hardly a question to pass the smelling salts…
‘Where this leaves a clinician concerned to inform the consent of his or her patients, children or adults, would seem to be an interesting question.’
This plays right in to the hands of Pharmaceutical Companies.
They might see someone play around with figures and algorithms, but, they won’t see anybody actually fire an exocet missile in to their groins.
Don’t people want courage and heroism, I think so, but, apparently not in the cloistered world of medical publishing.
Peer Review Guidance:
“Because a peer-reviewed journal will not publish articles that fail to meet the standards established for a given discipline, peer-reviewed articles that are accepted for publication exemplify the best research practices in a field.”
“An overall, serious, thoughtful tone” …
In the case of Study 329 there also appeared to be a desperate hunt for some box to tick that would make BMJ fireproof, some proof that the scurvy knaves behind the Restoration of Study 329 were adhering to some protocol that would make the results objective and definitive – exactly the opposite message to the message of the final article which is that the results are provisional and that objectivity as regards what these drugs do for good and for bad arises from having the data out there so they can be contested.
Science involves getting data into the public domain where it can challenge beliefs. But decades ago BMJ and other journals gave up on any attempt to access the clinical trial data behind the claims being made.
Now BMJ are signed up to an AllTrials coalition that includes GSK and is against Data Access.
https://davidhealy.org/study-329-conflicts-of-interest/
BMJ state that it takes on average 8 weeks from submission to publication of an article. The review process for Restoring Study 329 took a year, with a three month review process involving six reviewers to begin with, and then a further four reviews in a four month process, leading to a provisional acceptance in March that was withdrawn.
Paul Scheffer
@PaulScheffer3
Formindep is a non-lucrative association dealing with conflict of interests in Health
On this topic, I find this conference from oct 2019 in Lyon University of Pr David Healy about the study 329 linked with large prescriptions of antidepressents to adolescents very worth seeing and sharing :
Lyon, 2019
David Healy – GSK 329 Talk – Lyon, October 15th, 2019 (sous-titres ENG et FR)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=ZrYPYlXA0b4&feature=emb_logo
The Educational Tract …
Annie,
Thanks for the link to this riveting lecture. Really “edge of the seat” listening for an hour.
I increasingly feel that prescribers have not, will not, and do not wish to either understand the devastation caused by AKATHISIA, or to learn how to recognise and manage this common, important, life threatening adverse drug reaction.
What is the point of the “Choose Psychiatry” propaganda campaign coercing medical students to consider training in a “discipline” where differential diagnostic accuracy appears to be so neglected?
Where casual and ill-conceived diagnostic labels destroy life, and all life’s hopes, dreams and aspirations?
Where a series of incorrect diagnoses can never be revised and corrected. Where no one can ever say: “I’m sorry”?
Now, if additional exposure to being taught in psychiatry produced graduates who could reliably differentiate akathisia from psychotic depression, distinguish a toxic delusion from a functional psychosis, and afford utmost priority to minimising the dreadful adverse reactions of the drugs given to those to “treat” misdiagnosed AKATHISIA: wouldn’t some of us be be delighted to support it?
It would be preferable for clinical medical students to spend an invaluable hour watching and listening to this critically important lecture, wherever they choose to specialise after graduating.
I did elect to commit to extra training in psychiatry as an undergraduate and found the time spent to be very valuable.
I did not however, understand that so much of what I perceived to be the signs, symptoms and features of severe mental illness were in reality, drug induced brain, neurological and multi-systems, enforced, prescription drug injuries.
It tragically takes personal or family experience of misdiagnosed akathisia to realise the individual suffering and societal cost of akathisia ignorance.
To get across to the public what AKATHISIA really is requires simplicity and visual intensity/correlation, words – especially techincal stuff – are not really good. The part that David nailed on this and can be slotted into twitter, facebook, instagram and the like is here:
https://youtu.be/ZrYPYlXA0b4?t=1887
Thank you, Annie, for the link to the Lyon talk. Wow, how it takes me back to the beginning of Shane’s problems in 2002 when we had no idea what on earth was going on with him and had no answers to his repeated questioning of “what is WRONG with me, what’s happening to me?”. Suddenly, along came Panorama and the Seroxat story with descriptions of exactly what we’d seen in Shane – the totally out of character behaviours, the pacing, the turmoil, the rage, the self harming, the suicidal thoughts – we’d witnessed it all.
Fast forward to 2019 and here, at last, we have David putting in writing that, in his opinion, ‘most of Shane’s problems have been caused by what we in the mental health services have done to him rather than by any condition he has had.’
If only we could turn back time! More disappointing still, of course, is the fact that this same talk still needs to be heard – that STILL there remains so many who are in the dark as far as adverse reactions to prescribed drugs are concerned. David, I only wish that we’d have had the facilities for you to present this talk when you came to Prestatyn in June as there seems to be a thirst here still for more information regarding the ‘goings on’ that you shared with us on both of your visits. Asking people to watch online is not quite the same as sharing face to face, however, I shall certainly point people in the direction of this talk on YouTube whenever I’m asked when it is that you’ll next visit us – a question asked on a fairly regular basis by the way!
I read your article. Interesting that the editor thought dead children wasn’t worthy of a concerning tone. I didn’t find it polemic (hardly fire and brimstone) but rather stated the facts and that parties involved didn’t think more studies needed to be done. So Yes worth the dig indeed. Hard to believe these things but then people have been dying literally dying in the US for years because they can’t afford their insulin. People apparently don’t matter.
A few years ago, when your crew were struggling to get that brilliant dissection of Paxil Study 329 published in the BMJ, it was fairly clear where the objections were coming from. At least on the editorial team.
To wit: A celebrated, high-minded expert on “evidence-based medicine” with a career as a headache specialist that was tied by a thousand threads to GSK and its migraine drugs. (And a spouse in a ritzy New York law firm that was defending GSK all around the globe.)
https://davidhealy.org/restoring-study-329-letter-to-bmj-jan-2016/
You guys did not hesitate to call her out and question her “conflict of interest.” I think you were right, too. It wasn’t a matter of wanting a pure and sterile “odour-free” appearance. It was a fight for free speech in the scientific community and beyond. And you won, too! It may not have blown the BMJ and the medical establishment wide open for all time. But I do not think it was a meaningless victory.
So it’s hard to understand why you seem to think such efforts are sterile or meaningless now. Or what earthly good it would do us to have “more Elizabeth Loders, not less.” If they were really the only source of fresh ideas, you and the 329 team would not exist. But you do exist.
I know that fighting “conflict of interest” is not the only fight, just as Doctor Loder was not your only foe. And merely “disclosing” conflicts of interest doesn’t do doodly-squat in a world where they have become so absolutely goddamn normal. And of course, you’ll find plenty of decent people doing GSK’s bidding from dawn till dusk without being personally bought off. Especially at the bottom of the food chain, and the middle too.
But that does not change what is going on at the top. From what I can see, the first law of physics is still “Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.” If you want a song about windmills, you can’t expect an oil company to write it. As long as they are in charge, all the songs will be about oil.
Jo
I think the groundrules are changing. Just as the capitalists replaced the landowners, so too they are being replaced by those who hold the latest technique or algorithm. Holding the lastest technique confers power (and capital). But you can be poor little fucker, stumble on some magic beans and be more powerful than a Rothschild – see Zuckerberg. Its the same with Frontiers. They don’t mind if all articles are anti-pharma. The problems for us is the process is mindless – other than making money from the platform owners who can declare their virtue by saying they accept no pharma money and all their articles are open-access.
We are moving into a world of technocrats and managers who won’t just be little Eichmann’s they will be un-prosecutable, and untouchable.
D
Well, I realize a lot of things are changing. Still, I can’t see the drug and device companies being reduced to helpless outsiders at the mercy of a mindless outfit like “Frontiers in Medicine.” They have lots of ways to stay in control.
In an article on the future of the major-league medical journals last year, one expert said fewer and fewer doctors are reading them anyway, much less subscribing. They rely on “other sources of compiled information” to tell them who and what to trust. He named two: Official guidelines, and Cochrane Reviews. I suspect the third is commercial Continuing Medical Education (“CME”)—not just the posh conferences in Hawaii, but the webinars and the glossy trade mags like Psychiatry Advisor and its cousins.
All three sources are pretty firmly under industry’s thumb, as I don’t have to tell you. Especially that third one. Drug company payments that are laundered through the CME Industry are exempt from disclosure under the Sunshine Act – which is why so many of the nastiest KOL’s look so squeaky-clean on the Open Payments website. And their content is not just “credible” – it’s approved to satisfy the continuing-ed requirements of your boss, your College and your state licensing agency. Hell, why read anything else?
Meanwhile, it seems like the “Frontiers” journals are rapidly being called out as purveyors of pseudo-science. And the nonsense they often publish serves as just another foil for a “War in Defense of Science” that allows doctors to blindly accept the latest conventional wisdom, refuse to listen to their patients … and feel like warriors in a sacred cause when they do it, rather than squirming even a little.
One man, one battle cry …
Molly’s dad has a campaign and right behind him is the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists –
We’re calling on social media companies to hand over their data for research into the risks and benefits of social media.
@bernadkad
, chair of
@rcpsychCAP
says it’s time for the Government to take action.
Royal College of Psychiatrists
@rcpsych
·
3h
Replying to
@rcpsych
,
@bernadkad
and
@RcpsychCAP
Read our full report here: https://bit.ly/35X4gpT. Press release is here: https://bit.ly/2Rnpgks. This story is being covered across the media, including as the top story on the BBC website: https://bbc.in/2TwbUFb. It was also the top story on the
@BBCr4today
programme today.
https://twitter.com/rcpsych
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/improving-care/better-mh-policy/college-reports/college-report-cr225.pdf
The single greatest cause of suicide and suicidality in young people is likely to be the medication they take. But despite being repeatedly handed a story about how the entire literature on these pills is ghost-written and the data inaccessible and that regulators have approved drugs on the back of negative trials and Guidelines bodies like NICE recommend these same drugs despite knowing the trials are negative, the BBC have repeatedly flunked handling the story and the Guardian and other newspapers are as bad.
Suicide: Are Old Media or New Media to Blame?
January, 30, 2019 | 39 Comments
https://davidhealy.org/suicide-are-old-media-or-new-media-to-blame/
The single greatest cause of suicide and suicidality in young people is likely to be the medication they take.
Yeah this is a significant move. They will definitely be going for MiA.
If anyone has Ian Russell’s email contact I will link Davids work on Akathisia here to him. Think he deserves to know the truth and hopefully through that, how he is being used.
I’ve already sent infomation to Daniel Dyball UK executive director of the Internet Association.
These people need informing as well as others:
https://www.instagram.com/about/us/
It’s like banging your head against a brick wall isn’t it – they’ll hang on to ANYTHING except the most obvious. I think there IS a place for holding social media to account but pushing for that and ignoring all other aspects is certainly not the answer.
Interesting to note – many comments this morning about the ‘dangers of painkillers’ programme on BBC2 last Thursday. All quoting the message that David shared at the first of our meetings with him back in November 2018 and astonished at the lack of transparency concerning their own set of prescribed medications. ( I guess that, due to age, painkillers hit the target – so to speak! – far more than the AD message!) We can all fall into the “it couldn’t happen to me” trap but it seems that David’s message had shaken the audience enough for them to now be tuning in to listen to, and believe, other doctors who are sharing similar facts with the public. If one little group, in one little corner of north Wales can take, and keep, on board the message that all is not as it seems in the world of medicine, then why is it so difficult to get larger groups to believe it too?………or is it true that this little group only share these stories with me ( or others like me) who they obviously know is passionate about the reality and truth of the message? If so, then unfortunately we’ll be waiting a long time for the message to spread!
Edited Wikipidia thebmj Under ‘Controversies’
‘An extremel;y serious case whereby David Healy Professor of Pharmacology/psychiatry exposed Study 329 and it’s publication in thebmj
see video and articles on David Healy blog’
Another one publish under controversies -‘ Cello Scrotum -‘The case report was published in the BMJ[20] The truth of the case was reported on back in 1991[23] but it still remained in the BMJ until 2009………;shows the immaturity of the medics involved but has much more serious implications for readers of journals.
Hotly contested transparency…
In a setback to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a legal adviser to the European Court of Justice suggested the drug maker may have restricted competition when it reached patent settlements with several generic companies that sought to market a version of the Paxil antidepressant.
European Court adviser deals Glaxo a setback in ‘pay-to-delay’ case
By Ed Silverman @Pharmalot
January 22, 2020
https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2020/01/22/glaxo-pay-delay-paxil-european-court/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=07a6a1e632-Pharmalot&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-07a6a1e632-149674737
Although not legally binding, the determination supports a decision made three years ago by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority, which argued that between 2001 and 2004, Glaxo paid several generic companies more than $65 million to effectively delay the launch of lower-cost versions of its pill. The patent on the antidepressant, known as Seroxat in the U.K., expired in 1999.
European court upholds controversial EMA transparency rules for clinical trial data
By Ed Silverman @Pharmalot
January 22, 2020
After months of anticipation, the European Court of Justice has sided with the European Medicines Agency in its bid to provide access to clinical trial data and other types of information as part of a hotly contested transparency policy.
https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2020/01/22/ema-clinical-trial-data-transparency/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&utm_campaign=07a6a1e632-Pharmalot&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-07a6a1e632-149674737
The court was reviewing appeals filed by two drug makers — Merck (MRK) and PTC Therapeutics (PTCT) — that claimed greater transparency would come at the expense of their commercial secrets. The cases have been closely watched as a test of EMA rules, as well as a policy that permits the agency to release certain clinical trial data, while also agreeing to select redactions negotiated with companies.
European Ombudsman
@EUombudsman
We welcome today’s @EUCourtPress ruling confirming public access to clinical study trials.
judgement https://europa.eu/!df47bT
We worked with @EMA_News over many years for greater transparency in this area
https://europa.eu/!VW63qU
https://europa.eu/!tv48ck
Thanks for repeating the warning! I am now being more careful about anything with chemicals included. recently bought E45 which is recommended for excema and itchy skin. Checked whether increased itchyness and blotchiness could be related to using it for the first time – and one of the contraindications is that it can cause the serious stinging as well as increase in original symptoms! These common meds can’t be just taken for granted as you warn. Best of luck with the work you are doing in N Wales – long live small dedicated independant groups
Imagine if each of these celebrities retracted their statements and started to ask questions as to why they were led to believe in this myth. Further, imagine if these celebrities put their weight behind prescription drug-induced akathisia and suicides.
https://fiddaman.blogspot.com/2020/01/celebrities-keeping-myth-alive.html#.Xi26bmhKhdg
We all say Hear! Hear!
MISSD
@MISSDFoundation
This interview and the thorough @Fiddaman blog coverage of the
@GSK Chicago trial at which the jury found #Paxil was responsible for precipitating Stewart Dolin’s death, is much appreciated. #Seroxat #pharma #drugs #InformedConsent #SuicidePrevention
Dolin Vs GSK – The Verdict
https://fiddaman.blogspot.com/2017/04/dolin-vs-gsk-verdict.html
“Don’t you think if these medicines caused suicide someone would have spoken up?” ~ Andy Bayman – King & Spalding. The jury hav…
Much-Needed, New Approaches
AntiDepAware Retweeted
James Moore Retweeted
How to tell if a Drug is Causing Suicide and What to Do Next
Wednesday, May 6, 1:30-3 PM Eastern, 10:30-Noon Pacific
David Healy, MD (McMaster University)
Title: How to Tell if a Drug is Causing Suicide and What to Do Next
Description: Clinical practice is judicial in nature. This means that establishing what is going on depends on engaging with a person and working out how best to explain the problem they have. The “scientific” literature is not much help in this respect. The challenge is to get to an objective position shared by the affected person, a mental health professional and ideally others. This workshop will take participants through this process and outline strategies for working through objections that may arise with the persons and clinicians involved.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/01/new-approaches-working-with-suicidal-people/
https://education.madinamerica.com/p/innovative-approaches-suicide
Note: All webinars will be recorded and available for viewing after the live event.
As it seems enough doctors don’t have the gumption to fill in a Rxisk Report even though looking at the template it is as quick (as they moan about lack of time) or complex as they care to make it – couldn’t a way around this be to ask people who have already so generously donated intimate parts of their medical history – to copy the relevant parts of their own notes and allow Rxisk to read them under the same, or if requested stronger conditions of confidentiality eg only named persons to read them? They could be published under pseudoanonymisation or with names or identifying information redacted.
Susanne, I’m sure that you, like me, have mentioned the Rxisk website to doctors. I wonder if, like me, you found that a glazed look took over their faces at the mention! It seems that linking themselves to anything to do with Rxisk would be considered a very risky move. The same glazed look appears too at the mention of David’s name. They may live to regret those looks one day!
Hi Mary – glazed looks and all the rest of it I know what you mean! But i am not sure if it was clear enough -am suggesting there is a way around it as nobody has to ask permission to show their medical notes to David/Risk. They don’t have to give a reaoson for requesting notes or even tell anyone what they intend doing or have done unless they want to – I wouldn’t – call it Samizdat or call it owning your own life And the medics notes should indicate what opinions and areas ofdisagreement etc are recorded This would be especaily easy if people have online access already. I can’t find any weasel worded clause which would prevent doing this.
Very interesting! I have to admit that I’ve no idea how much info would be found in medical notes these days as it seems to me as if they’re all looking after their own back – with a few exceptions of course!
What’s greed praying on vulnerable young women got to do with it.
http://www.marketwatch.com ›
8 Jan 2020 – An estimated 1.4 million young women have been given potentially unnecessary and invasive medical tests the tests cost upwards of $123 million in a year, the researchers estimated, using 2014 Medicare payment data that specified $37.97 for a pelvic exam and $44.78 for a Pap smear. These potentially unneeded screenings can result in “false alarms, unnecessary treatment, and needless cost,” Qin told MarketWatch in an email.
A Great Story, for Samizdat Health and a Rumble in the Jungle – tom toms
A UK epidemiologist and Cochrane Collaboration researcher is suing the drug company Roche in the US, claiming that it defrauded federal and state governments by falsely claiming that its antiviral drug oseltamivir (Tamiflu) could be a powerful tool in mitigating a flu pandemic.
Tom Jefferson, a frequent contributor to The BMJ, is suing as a private whistleblower for $1.5bn (£1.1bn; €1.4bn), roughly the amount that US public health authorities spent building up their pandemic stockpile of oseltamivir. The stockpile is still maintained today, though recent purchases have involved generic versions, as Tamiflu’s main patent expired in 2016.
Should Jefferson win, he would be awarded up to 30% of any monies recovered, while the rest would be returned to public coffers.
Jefferson’s Cochrane acute respiratory infections group was engaged by the UK government to undertake a major review of the effectiveness of oseltamivir in 2009, after …
https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m314
News
Cochrane reviewer sues Roche for claiming Tamiflu could slow flu pandemic
BMJ 2020; 368 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m314 (Published 27 January 2020) Cite this as: BMJ 2020;368:m314
As the BMJ cuts us off from reading further –
Tom on Wikipedia –
Notable work
He has said that the studies claiming large reductions in mortality rates as a result of the influenza vaccine are “rubbish”,[1]
and that “influenza vaccines are about marketing and not science”.[7]
He has called repeatedly for placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials to prove the efficacy of flu vaccines, a position that most in the field hold as unethical.[1]
His views on flu vaccines are opposed by the medical establishment.[1]
Prof. Peter Gøtzsche
@PGtzsche1
The Zyprexa Papers, a must-read book about illegal, forced drugging – destroying patients. Psychiatrists, lawyers and Eli Lilly lied shamelessly, and judges didn’t care. Only in Alaska Supreme Court did lawyer Jim Gottstein get justice. #psychiatry #thezyprexapapers
Big Pharma Meets Big Diagnosis, Big Courts, and Big Psychiatric Hospitals
By
Paula J. Caplan, PhD
January 31, 2020
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/01/zyprexa-papers/
If you think the truth can set us free, and you care about harm done to suffering souls who seek help from the traditional mental health system, only to discover too often and too late that that system exponentially adds to their burdens, Jim Gottstein’s blockbuster new book, The Zyprexa Papers, is essential reading. It should be required reading for every well-meaning friend or family member of someone who suffers emotionally, as well as for legislators who genuinely want to weed out corruption and harm.
The book is focused on the neuroleptic drug Zyprexa and two cases related to it — one in which Gottstein represented a client and one in which he became the accused — but importantly, it exemplifies problems throughout the systems of not only Big Pharma but also what could be called Big Diagnosis, Big Psychiatric Hospitals, and Big Mental Health-related Courts. It’s a book about how the tsunami fed by the profit motive and the vast systems involved in the politics of mental health, including the so-called justice system, swamps what ought to be primary: the alleviation of emotional pain.
Gottstein’s book is The Pentagon Papers of the traditional mental health system, because he exposes a mind-blowing number and variety of cold-blooded, calculating actions on the part of Eli Lilly in trying to hide what it knew to be the devastating effects of its hugely profitable Zyprexa, from its lies of both omission and commission about relevant data to what can only be called its persecution of Gottstein himself for trying to sound the alarm.
“Documents prised out of companies by American court cases,” he says, “have become the main way we have of discovering the truth about some of our best-selling drugs.”
“The scientific literature, the very place doctors would look for a warning,” he writes, “contained barely a hint of problems.”
“What’s more, no one seems likely ever to have to answer for what appears to be fraud,” he points out.
Evelyn Pringle: SSRI Pushers under Fire — (Scoop)
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
https://ssristories.org/drug-companies-kept-information-secret-about-ssris/
Truth Buried in Litigation Graveyard
Written as part of the SSRI Litigation Round-Up, Sponsored by Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman’s Pharmaceutical Litigation Department
“Glaxo has known for two decades that Paxil can cause people of all ages to commit suicide. The company not only hid the risk, but stuck its head in the sand and ignored countless suicides that occurred in its clinical trials,” says Michael Baum, senior managing partner of Baum Hedlund and Paxil attorney. Baum adds that Paxil’s Black Box warning—which states there is a suicide risk for children, adolescents and young adults, but the risk ends at age 24—is “just wrong.”
https://www.baumhedlundlaw.com/prescription-drugs/paxil-injuries/generic-paxil-suicide-lawsuit/
BOB FIDDAMAN
@Fiddaman
It is with great sadness that I announce the death of the extraordinary investigative journalist, Evelyn Pringle.
https://fiddaman.blogspot.com/2020/02/evelyn-evie-pringle.html#.XjVbU2hKhdg
Drip Drip Drip – Paxil Info Leaks Out …
Anybody , all of us .can edit a wikipidia entry – it’s not exclusive to ;so called ‘cochrane wikipedians’
Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Cochrane/Wikipedian in training
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
< Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine | Cochrane
Welcome WIKIPEDIAN
IN TRAINING RESOURCE How to Edit Start a Project Cochrane Reviews
Wikipedian in Training Resource
Dear Wikipedia Project Participants.
Thank you for your interest in contributing to the Cochrane Wikipedia Project. I look forward to your article improvements. My name is Jenny and I am the "Wikipedian in Residence" for Cochrane. My role includes providing information and supporting the efforts of Cochrane groups who are interested in engaging with Wikipedia to improve the quality of the health-related articles that people are accessing on the internet.
Contents:
Suggested first steps for getting started
Practice editing Wikipedia
Sharing Cochrane Evidence on Wikipedia
Example of General Workflow: Adding Cochrane Evidence to Wikipedia
Other ways to be involved and resources
For an ‘edit’-in the cochrane wikipedia project.
Mad in America SCIENCE, PSYCHIATRY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Institutional Corruption in the Cochrane Collaboration by Peter Gotzche
Cochrane includes a section on how to set up a Wikipidia web site -would it be worth Risk setting one up?
A cross-reference to RxISK is available here, on this site, which is one I have referred to on occasion – a stand alone RxISK Wiki page could be a good idea as it becomes more and more well-known … ?
Healy is a founder and chief executive officer of Data Based Medicine Limited, which operates through its website RxISK.org, which aims to make medicines safer through “online direct patient reporting of drug effects”.
David Healy (psychiatrist)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Healy_(psychiatrist)
External links[edit]
David Healy’s site to research and report drug side effects
David Healy’s homepage
This page was last edited on 4 December 2019, at 18:24 (UTC).
His main areas of research are the contribution of antidepressants to suicide,
Everything in wikipedia on healy is written by trolls
there is no way to put something on wikipedia that is not open to trolling
D
I notice they’ve corrected your year of birth now – used to show you as around 85 years old!
The place for impact is on social media preferably with people who have a million and more followers. Bob Fiddaman does a good job, but it needs to go viral to have the potential to help the unsuspecting/trusting person going to their GP with anxiety/insomnia. All the subtle complexities of fraud/lies will be lost, people seek pleasure online it’s only a click away from facing up to all this, so they don’t… It’s someone else’s problem. Usually only after the fact of some horror show death or near death they will find this and such like sites and begin the struggle to grasp what happened and how they were expendable in a bigger picture of lies greed profit.
It’s just not possible to get any traction in say art media. If you try to inform these people, artists like: Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Francesca Woodman died because they likely had drug induced Akathisia and that many other artists have and are going to die because the art world doesn’t give a fig.. They don’t care. If however the director of MoMA decides it’s an issue you better believe it’s going into art media.
First came to suspect Mark Rothko (a true giant of western twentieth century art) suicide was due to akathisia when I viewed this video some years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qddcgLolAI&list=PL3t9dDBjNQVDZ1HIp8yU3HJdiaMHNKV3q
I sought to contact his daughter (who is a research pathologist) ofcourse there was no reply and I’ve no idea if my email was seen by anybody. But I do know that after it, Mark Rothko’s Wikipedia page was changed removing that he had been prescribed an antidepressant.
Rothko’s family were being shafted by…
“Kate and Christopher sued the executors of their father’s estate – his accountant, Bernard Reis, the painter Theodoros Stamos, and a professor of anthropology called Morton Levine (Levine was also, until Kate took steps to remedy the situation, Christopher’s guardian) – and his gallery, the Marlborough, claiming that the former had conspired with the latter to ‘waste the assets’ of Rothko’s estate and defraud them of their proper share. The assets were 798 paintings (then estimated to be worth at least $32m).”
But the actual cause of Rothko’s death…..
My view on getting traction on this, is that these cases of famous people need to be brought to light.
We now see the word Akathisia in MSM: The Independent.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/jordan-peterson-drug-addiction-benzo-valium-xanex-russia-mikhaila-a9324871.html
A few months ago I wrote a email reply to this:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/england-wales-mortality-health-medicine-nhs-death-rate-a8256931.html
This is part of it:
“including a very rapid and largely unreported recent increase in the numbers of deaths among mental health patients in care in England and Wales. ”
“and no one really knows why”
People in psychiatric units are subject to high doses and polypharmacy of drugs that cause Akathisia and Toxic Psychosis.
These conditions are not usually diagnosed by psychiatrists, but are seen as a worsening of “mental illness” which brings further polypharmacy… another antipsychotic/antidepressant/benzodiazepine. Akathisia/Toxic Psychosis is a horrific condition causing: suicide ideation, suicide, aggression, violence and even homicide. The degree to which people are affected will be dependent upon their ability to metabolise the drugs.”
To my amazement, got a reply suggesting I write a letter, which I did, it was not published. Also suggested Independent contact David Healy and gave link to the blog on Spotlight On the suicides and that they should ask him to write something.