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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19476

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: Electronic Source

Carlat D
Like a Bad Penny, the Nemeroff/Schatzberg 'Textbook' Problem Returns
The Carlat Psychaitry Blog 2011 Apr 5
http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/


Full text:

Do you remember the hoopla a few months back about a textbook apparently ghostwritten by medical writers hired by the makers of Paxil? Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg were the identified authors, but a letter was posted on the internet showing that STI, a medical writing company, had written a first draft of the textbook. See my posts here and here about the issue. The textbook, as published, ended up being a veiled advertisement for Paxil.

The APA responded by denying wrongdoing in the organization’s official newspaper here. They claim possession of various documents proving that the textbook was not ghostwritten. The obvious rejoinder is, “show me the documents.” This is exactly what psychiatrists Robert Rubin, Bernard Carroll, and professor Leeman McHenry asked Psychiatric News in this letter to the editor. They make the following entirely reasonable request:

“We call on the APA/APPI to release all the key documents. The contract between STI and GSK will reveal how much influence GSK had on the content and tone of the book, and the role of GSK in approving drafts. Correspondence between Drs. Nemeroff and Schatzberg and STI will make it clear whether they followed the contract. Transparency also requires release of any GSK marketing/ business plans for the Handbook; the legal release form transferring ownership from GSK to the ‘authors’ and APPI; marketing activities of GSK sales representatives detailing the Handbook; and correspondence among all parties regarding the “unrestricted” educational grant.”

Psychiatric News has refused to publish it. Here is their rejection letter.

I don’t think this issue is going away. It’s time for the APA to prove to the world that they were not complicit with a drug company in publishing a “textbook” that artfully hid Paxil’s side effects.

 

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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