At top medical schools, more than half the profs have drug industry ties

By Jacob Goldstein

"Sometimes it seems like everybody has financial ties to the drug or device industry. As it turns out, it’s only a little more than half of everybody.

A survey conducted in 2006-07 and published this week in the journal Health Affairs found that 53% of academic research faculty in the life sciences at top schools reported financial ties to industry.

About a third of the respondents said they had served as consultants, nearly a quarter said they had been paid speakers and 20% said they had received research funding from industry. That last figure is down from 28% of researchers who said they received research funding from industry in a similar survey conducted in 1995.

The authors suggest a number of possible causes of the drop in researchers who said they got industry funding for research, including a big increase in NIH research funding since 1995 and more scrutiny of academic-industry ties.

(Speaking of that scrutiny, you might want to take a look at a story in this morning’s New York Times that describes how the big health-care bills in both houses of Congress would require industry to report payments to doctors.)"



Read more at WSJ Blog

WSJ: Surgeon Didn't Disclose Company Ties

... a sweet news item ...
"UCLA Says Surgeon Didn't Disclose Company Ties


By DAVID ARMSTRONG

A top surgeon at the University of California at Los Angeles has lost his position as executive director of its spine center and faces an investigation by the school into his research after allegedly failing to disclose he was being paid by several companies whose products he was studying.

Between 2002 and 2008, Jeffrey Wang repeatedly failed to report on forms filed with the state and with the medical school that he was receiving consulting payments, stock options and royalties from five companies on whose products he was conducting research, according to the university. The failure to report these relationships "violated university guidelines," the school said.

"UCLA regrets that in the case of Dr. Jeffrey Wang, associate professor of orthopedic surgery, a pattern of non-disclosure could have persisted without our knowledge," the school said in a statement. "We are committed to examining our processes to determine how, as an institution, we will prevent similar problems in the future."

Dr. Wang didn't return a telephone call to his office seeking comment. He remains on the school faculty.

Dr. Wang was removed as co-executive director of the UCLA Comprehensive Spine Center. A university spokeswoman said the school is considering further sanctions against him.

The university also has appointed a committee to investigate Dr. Wang's work and determine whether the payments from companies affected his research and "if there are any mitigating actions needed to ensure the integrity of the research results." UCLA said it would make the results of that inquiry public, but that so far it has not found evidence of research misconduct. His research involved studying the products in both animals and humans.

UCLA alleges that Dr. Wang failed to disclose financial interests in connection with research projects sponsored by DePuy Spine Inc., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, which paid Dr. Wang $125,900 in royalty and consulting payments from 2002 through 2008; Facet Solutions Inc., a company in which Dr. Wang acquired options for 18,000 shares in 2004; Paradigm Spine LLC, an entity related to another company in which Dr. Wang received options for 20,000 shares; FzioMed Inc., which paid Dr. Wang $144,000 from 2002 through 2008; and medical-device maker Medtronic Inc., which paid Dr. Wang $275,000 in royalty and consulting payments from 2003 through 2008.

In the case of Medtronic, Dr. Wang did report some, but not all payments from the company, according to the school.

Dr. Wang published at least two favorable evaluations of Oxiplex, a product from FzioMed to prevent spinal adhesions. In 2004, he was the author of a study published in Neurosurgical Focus that found Oxiplex "easy to use and safe." That study noted FzioMed provided funding for the study, but didn't cite the payments to Dr. Wang.

A 2008 abstract published in the Spine Journal by Dr. Wang and a co-author found "consistent clinically significant improvement in outcomes resulting from the use of Oxiplex gel in lumbar spine surgery." While the abstract doesn't indicate Dr. Wang had a financial relationship with FzioMed, he is listed as a consultant to the company elsewhere in the journal.

A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee in July 2008 voted against approving Oxiplex for sale in the U.S. because it wasn't convinced the product was effective.

Most medical schools require doctors to report financial relationships and often have rules limiting how much they can receive from companies whose products are being studied. But medical schools often have difficulty verifying whether financial information filed by doctors is accurate.

A handful of states, including Massachusetts and Minnesota, have instituted public-reporting requirements in which drug and medical-device companies must disclose payments to physicians for many kinds of services, including consulting.

Two U.S. senators, Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa and Democrat Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, are pushing for a federal law that would require companies to report payments to doctors of more than $100."

WSJ -What s doctor did that was worth $1M

This is just a little gator - cleaning up the whole swamp will be a big job.

Joanna Moncrieff: The Myth of the Chemical Cure

"...although ideas like the serotonin theory of depression have been widely publicised, scientific research has not detected any reliable abnormalities of the serotonin system in people who are depressed.
Second, it is often said the fact that drug treatment "works" proves there's an underlying biological deficiency.
But there is another explanation for how psychiatric drugs affect people with emotional problems.
It is frequently overlooked that drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis.
Psychoactive drugs make people feel different; they put people into an altered mental and physical state."


This is absolutely true. Pharmaceutical companies put the information right in their products. Package inserts and patient information on SSRI's and other psychoactive drugs often list "altered mental status" as a side effect.

In fact, altered mental status is listed in the
Merck Veterinary Manual!

In some countries physicians are not even required to tell patients about such adverse drug effects; legally, they are permitted to leave that job to the pharmacist who fills the script. Once you have decided to fill a script, it may already be too late.


BBC Link
Dr. Moncreiff's site at University College London
Article from news at UCL
Link to her book

NAMI Busted - a long way from Mayberry

Did you know that American mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in the film A BEAUTIFUL MIND, got well on his own and never took drugs for schizophrenia?
Link -NAMISCC
His wife Sylvia Nasar thought Nash's refusal to take drugs "may have been fortunate," since their side effects "would have made his gentle re-entry into the world of mathematics a near impossibility". But worse, if he had, he might not have survived - almost certainly not to become an octogenarian.


Lying about mental health for profit is wrong. NAMI - and Ron Howard - sure are a long way from the simple truths and decency of Mayberry.

Bruce Levine follows this pharma money trail at Huffington Post.

If you have dislosures to make about NAMI's ties to Pharma, please contact Senator Grassley's office.

Corporate Influence in Academic Science

Power-point presentation from Tufts University with input from Ralph Nader.
Link

Diagnosis: Greed

Sir William Osler

"About three decades ago, it became possible to make serious money as a university researcher. Not that the money was so bad before, of course. It was respectable. But it wasn’t Wall Street-type money.
That changed in the early 1980s with the passage of legislation that allowed universities to patent their publicly funded research results and then grant exclusive licenses to pharmaceutical companies. The public-private wall came down. The universities received royalties on the drugs, and the royalties were split between the researchers and the departments. Start-up companies were spun off and sold. University researchers became, essentially, partners to industry.

The change wasn’t just structural, however. There was a cultural shift, a kind of boundary melt.
“Greed became respectable,” Angell, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and the former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, recalled. “There used to be a sort of tension between doing well and doing good for medical researchers. If they wanted to make a lot of money in a high-risk sort of job they could work for industry. If they wanted to do important, exciting research they stayed in academia and they had a comfortable life but not great wealth.

“Before 1980, they were aware of this tension,” she said. “Before 1980, those who went into industry were held in some disdain. With Reagan, all this changed. There was a strong feeling that the world divided into winners and losers. In medical research this just has had enormous implications.”

It’s had enormous implications for our world generally. On Wall Street, change had to come via catastrophe. Let’s hope it won’t take a disaster to bring sense back to medicine."

Article here.



Also see BLIND FAITH, a four-part series about Pharma blandishments in Academe, here.

Cancer Is A Fungus

You can stop cancer in its tracks simply by changing your body's pH. To do that, all you may need is a gentle, freely available ingredient: Baking soda or Bicarbonate soda. Isn't that wonderful?
Details here.
To learn more, please go to Dr. Simoncici's site.
Also see this article.
Listen to Dr. Simoncici on video here:

Hat tip and thanks for the suggestion to Mr. I.A.

Harvard doc pushes Ritalin, reaps $1.6M

Harvard Psychiatrist Didn’t Report Pharma Income

A Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of antipsychotics in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drugmakers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of the income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators, The New York Times reports.
By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Timothy Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules governing conflicts of interest, US Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican tells the Times, since some of their research is financed by government grants.

Wow!

Follow the money!
Visit Dr. Biederman here

Ironically, pro-force psych profiteer E. Fuller Torrey comments here:
“The price we pay for these kinds of revelations is credibility, and we just can’t afford to lose any more of that in this field,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, which finances psychiatric studies. “In the area of child psychiatry in particular, we know much less than we should, and we desperately need research that is not influenced by industry money.” (NYT)


Brains... they need brains...
Instances of deliberate breach of policy, including failure to file or knowingly filing an incomplete, erroneous, or misleading disclosure form, violations of the guidelines or failure to comply with prescribed monitoring procedures, will be adjudicated in accordance with applicable disciplinary policies and procedures of the Faculty of Medicine and of the affiliated hospitals. Possible sanctions will include the following:
1. Formal admonition;
2. The inclusion in the Faculty Member's file of a letter from the Office of the Dean indicating that the individual's good standing as a member of the Faculty has been called into question;
3. Ineligibility of the Faculty Member for grant applications, Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, or supervision of graduate students;
4. Non-renewal of appointment;
5. Dismissal from the Faculty of Medicine.
http://www.hms.harvard.edu/integrity/conf.html