A Portland doc flips on big pharma and reveals its “dirty little secret.”

Bitter Pill - A Portland doc flips on big pharma and reveals its “dirty little secret.”
BY PHILIP DAWDY

Ten percent of Americans—children, teens and adults—take antidepressants. Whether it’s Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, Effexor or Cymbalta, 30 million of us take a pill daily in hopes it will keep dark moods at bay. Antidepressants are the most prescribed family of drugs in America, an $11.9 billion market in the U.S. in 2007.

In January, Erick Turner, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University and a clinician at the Portland VA Medical Center, shook up the medical community, provoked the pharmaceutical establishment and, perhaps, disappointed millions of depressed Americans. He published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that revealed antidepressants are not as effective as we’ve been led to believe. For years, he implied, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer (maker of Zoloft) and Forest Laboratories (Celexa and Lexapro) have vastly exaggerated the performance of their drugs.

Turner calls it the “dirty little secret” of the psychiatric world.

It was a disclosure that was felt ’round the medical world, and for the past two months Turner has fielded press inquiries by the dozens.

Turner’s “is the kind of a paper that makes you wonder why someone didn’t do it a long time ago,” says S. Nassir Ghaemi, an associate professor of psychiatry and public health at Emory University School of Medicine and a leading researcher on bipolar disorder.

“It’s damaging” to the reputation of antidepressants, says Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac and a psychiatry professor at Brown University School of Medicine.

The paper has given Turner not rock-star status, perhaps, but at least a level of notoriety in a profession where physicians typically labor in anonymity. Since the paper’s publication, Turner has become a go-to source for reporters writing about depression and antidepressants.

But more important for Turner is how his work has shaken up the industry and raised questions about the integrity of the pharmaceutical industry and the weakness of the federal regulatory agency that’s supposed to protect the public from drugs that are dangerous or ineffective. It has also had the effect of raising an uncomfortable question: If antidepressants don’t work that well, why are so many Americans taking them?

The great irony of his discovery is that, for 18 months, Turner pimped for antidepressants. He wouldn’t put it that way, of course, as many doctors do the same thing. But starting in 2004, Turner, who is the
medical director of the Mood Disorders Program at the Portland VA and has worked at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health, became a speaker for Eli Lilly, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.

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Oh my. Thanks for the tip to author and blogger extraordinaire Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons.