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About Me
Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and MIT's Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University.
Category Archives: conflicts of interest
A review of two new books that attack the DSM-5, psychiatry’s “bible”
Share I reviewed two books now circulating about the DSM and the current controversy over the DSM-5 for The American Scholar — see review here. The two books are The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, FDA, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drug abuse, scientific misconduct
Tagged Allen Frances, APA, DSM, DSM-5, Gary Greenberg, NIMH, pharmaceutical industry, prescription drugs, pychiatric diagnoses
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Martin Keller, principal investigator of Paxil study 329, retires from Brown University
Share I just learned that Dr. Martin Keller, principal investigator of the controversial Paxil study 329, has retired from his position as a professor of psychiatry at Brown University — see here. As Pharmalot notes, Keller quietly retired June 30 in … Continue reading
Calls for action against authors of controversial Paxil study are getting louder
Share In the wake of GlaxoSmithKline’s record-breaking $3 billion settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, a number of psychiatrists and researchers have redoubled their efforts to get Paxil study 329 retracted. As mentioned here and in other news accounts, the … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, ghostwriting, National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct, university industry collaboration
Tagged antidepressants, Brown University, Department of Justice, GlaxoSmithKline, Health Care Renewal, Martin Keller, oneboringoldman, Paxil
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US Senator raises concerns about possible stock manipulation by Vertex executives
Share Senator Charles Grassley is upping the ante on the controversy surrounding the Vertex pharmaceutical executives who cashed in on overstated clinical trial data — see my blog from last week. According to The Boston Globe, which broke the Vertex … Continue reading
Vertex pharmaceutical executives cash in on false hopes
Share Senior executives at Vertex Pharmaceuticals made millions of dollars each by selling company stock in the days after the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical reported promising clinical trial data on an experimental drug for cystic fibrosis. And then weeks after they cashed … Continue reading
Fast-moving bill in Congress would weaken FDA oversight of new drugs and devices
Share Congress is moving quickly to pass a bill that would authorize higher industry fees for the FDA in exchange for speeding up the approval of some drugs and medical devices and eliminating restrictions on financial conflicts of interest among … Continue reading
Why 60 Minutes suddenly discovered the placebo effect in treating depression
Share When Dr. Irving Kirsch published his meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine in February 2008 showing that antidepressants were no more effective than a placebo in treating mild or moderate depression, the national news media ignored his explosive findings, for the … Continue reading
When it comes to scientific misconduct, should there be a statute of limitations?
Share I was hesitant to weigh in at first when I learned that Brown University’s School of Medicine had decided not to pressure a psychiatric journal to retract the seriously flawed Paxil study that I wrote about in Side Effects. … Continue reading
Enforcing anti-kickback laws: a powerful deterrent against ghost-writing in medicine
Share The Obama administration recently made it clear that it will require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment under the new health care law — see the New York … Continue reading
Posted in antidepressants, conflicts of interest, continuing medical education, drug marketing, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, university industry collaboration
Tagged anti-kick statutes, conflicts of interest in medicine, Congress, continuing medical education, corruption, drug and medical device companies
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From the Pentagon Papers to Allen Jones: Why it’s so hard to be a whistleblower
Share Allen Jones, the whistleblower in an ongoing landmark trial against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, was very much on my mind this past weekend. I was participating in a workshop to develop curriculum to teach college students about … Continue reading