by Alison Bass | Sep 28, 2008 | Uncategorized
When I was a reporter for The Boston Globe in the 90s, an employee of Brown University’s department of psychiatry handed me a raft of internal university documents. A number of these documents pertained to an ongoing clinical trial that compared the...
by Alison Bass | Sep 23, 2008 | Uncategorized
In June when the news broke that U.S. Senator Charles Grassley was probing the financial ties between Martin Keller, the chief of psychiatry at Brown University, and the drug industry, Brown officials tried to stonewall the entire issue. They refused to acknowledge...
by Alison Bass | Sep 17, 2008 | Uncategorized
I have to say I’m disappointed with the cover story on bipolar children in Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The author, Jennifer Egan, raises the interesting question about why there has been such a sharp increase in the diagnosis of childhood bipolar...
by Alison Bass | Sep 10, 2008 | Uncategorized
Judging by its response to the Senate Finance Committee, the leadership of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) still doesn’t seem to get it. For the past several months, the Finance Committee has been investigating conflicts of interest between academic...
by Alison Bass | Sep 3, 2008 | Uncategorized
Remember all those dire warnings from the psychiatric community that youth suicides would rise after the FDA put black box warnings on antidepressants in late 2004? The argument was that physicians would be scared away from prescribing these drugs for depressed youth,...
by Alison Bass | Aug 19, 2008 | Uncategorized
Critics of the pharmaceutical industry have long complained that drug companies resort to unscrupulous tactics to market their wares, handpicking friendly researchers (to whom they pay handsome consulting fees) for clinical trials, ghost-writing the results, and...
by Alison Bass | Aug 12, 2008 | Uncategorized
The August doldrums have settled in. Pharmalot is on vacation, as are most state and federal legislators. But there’s a few items I’d like to take note of, since I too was on vacation when this news broke: 1. Stanford University finally saw the light and...
by Alison Bass | Jul 31, 2008 | Uncategorized
It looks as if the Food and Drug Administration is not the only federal agency in need of a Congress-initiated overhaul. The same Congressmen who recently vowed to strengthen the FDA’s ability to levy fines against drug companies, order drug recalls and restrict...
by Alison Bass | Jul 23, 2008 | Uncategorized
Health Affairs bills itself as “the number one cited health policy journal devoted to publishing original, peer-reviewed research and commentary.” Judging by the journal’s review of my book, Side Effects, its commentary may be original but it sure...
by Alison Bass | Jul 20, 2008 | Uncategorized
A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) had asked the FDA to re-examine data it had received from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) way back in 1989 when the drug company first applied for approval of its antidepressant, Paxil. Grassley...
