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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15650

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Carlat D.
Akathisia-gate Scandal in Wall Street Journal
The Carlat Psychiatry Blog 2009 May 14
http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2009/05/akathisia-gate-scandal-in-wall-street.html


Full text:

Akathisia-gate, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s ongoing efforts to distract attention from the major side effect of its blockbuster antipsychotic drug Abilify, has expanded into a scandal that was covered on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal.

Staff writer Shirley Wang profiles Andy Behrman, a man with bipolar disorder who gained notoriety when he published the book Electroboy: A Memoir of Mania. According to the article, representatives of BMS approached Behrman after the book’s publication and asked him to do promotional speeches for Abilify, which was about to gain FDA approval for the treatment of mania. He initially signed a contract for $40,000, and eventually made up to $10,000/day.

The problem is, soon after he started taking Abilify, Behrman noticed restless sensations in his legs—akathisia. He said he told his BMS handlers about the side effect, which the company denies. At any rate, apparently the money he was receiving was just too good for him to tell the truth about his side effects, and he continued providing glowing endorsements. He said that the company provided him with talking points, and instructed him to reiterate in his talks that Abilify had no side effects and to avoid mentioning that he was being paid by BMS.

Of course, the company denies any malfeasance, claiming that Behrman requested an exhorbitant $7.5 million for further talks, and that the company refused the offer. The implication is that Behrman is simply a disgruntled former hired gun. We may never know the entire truth of the matter. But knowing the sordid history of pharmaceutical marketing tactics, I’m giving Behrman the benefit of the doubt here.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909