by Alison Bass | Feb 20, 2012 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, health care costs, pharmaceutical industry
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 most part....
by Alison Bass | Feb 7, 2012 | antidepressants, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, FDA, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct
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. After all, Brown has been covering up...
by Alison Bass | Jan 26, 2012 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, continuing medical education, drug marketing, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, university industry collaboration
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 Times. Large numbers...
by Alison Bass | Jan 18, 2012 | antipsychotic drugs, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, expert testimony, media coverage, pharmaceutical industry, whistleblowing
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 the importance of...
by Alison Bass | Jan 5, 2012 | Uncategorized
In preparing for the holidays, you may have missed the French scandal over the defective artificial breasts implanted in hundreds of thousands of women. According to NPR, an estimated 400,000 women worldwide have received the faulty implants, and 30,000 women in...
by Alison Bass | Dec 26, 2011 | Uncategorized
A few weeks before Thanksgiving, my husband, a hospice social worker, was told that his hours were being cut back from full to part-time. The explanation given to him, a six-year employee with solid performance reviews, was that the hospice’s census had declined...
by Alison Bass | Dec 12, 2011 | Uncategorized
I almost choked over my tea this morning when reading this The New York Times story, the gist of which was that French regulations governing conflicts of interest in medicine are considerably more lax than our own. If only that were true. The NYT article described how...
by Alison Bass | Dec 2, 2011 | antidepressants, antipsychotic drugs, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, FDA, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability office confirms something that Rose Firestein, the eponymous prosecutor in the title of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial noticed way back in the ’90s: that...
by Alison Bass | Nov 18, 2011 | antidepressants, conflicts of interest, drug marketing, ghostwriting, pharmaceutical industry, scientific journal retractions, scientific misconduct
The international research organization Healthy Skepticism has called on Brown University to help convince a psychiatric journal to retract the controversial Paxil trial that I wrote about in Side Effects, according to the Brown Daily Herald. The principal...
by Alison Bass | Nov 17, 2011 | biotech industry, clinical trials, conflicts of interest, patient care, pharmaceutical industry, Uncategorized, university industry collaboration
We’ve all signed those vague privacy statements when visiting our local hospital for medical care. But how many of us have actually read the fine print and understand that the most sensitive details of our medical lives may be shared with drug companies for...
