JANUARY 15, 2009

WE FLYZ EN SEL DRUGZ, EET RAT

I remember one time sitting out on the deck of my family's house on Puget Sound talking to my father and my brother and telling them that the people in academicS didn't have a sense of humour and they told me I should work in a different field. That seemed extreme to me at the time but in retrospect I think they were probably right. That is why I am saddened to have lately written such boring and unhumorous posts as my responses to the ACNP and others in which I didn't use any humour in order to not piss them off any more than they are already.

A lot of people have written to me saying that I had "courage" or similar things to express things directly. Fact is that academics take themselves too seriously, don't have a sense of humour, emphasize loyalty, and live in fear of their colleagues and of various outside forces. Come to think of it, it reminds me alot of the mafia from my wife's native Sicily. Like them, academics are a group that share in common something to hide, namely large payments from pharmaceutical companies that they privately justify as payment for services in drug development but that they nevertheless don't want to be publicly known.

Psychiatrists generally attribute criticism to scientologists or anti-psychiatrists and use that tactic to blow them off but my colleagues in medicine just go with a sense of self entitlement. One of the readers of the Drug News and Health Safety Blog was a physician in another department at Emory who complained that he went to his computer every morning and got an email called "Before You Take That Pill". He also complained that the publicity over pharma payments to physicians threatened his ability to get income from giving lectures funded by the pharmaceutical industry. So I just took him off my email list and he is happy now. Reminds me of a psychiatry consult I once did on an inpatient who had a heart attack and was depressed. He was obsessing about a picture in a heart education book they had given him that had a diagram of how a blood clot had obstructed a coronary artery. My "treatment" was to tear the page out of the book. Worked wonders.

I have been reading a book about the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and academic medicine and I am coming to the conclusion that ANY so-called education funded by pharma is suspect, and that physicians should go back to the old system of paying for their own god damn education. Or read a book for Christ's sake.

Anyhoo I digress and as usual I forgot what I was talking about. Oh, yes. Lolcats. Lolcats are always there to come to the rescue when we lose our sense of humour or get an exaggerated view of ourselves. Lisa Van Syckel told me that the quote from Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is:

If you swing a cat around by the tail you will hit someone from the pharmaceutical industry.

Swing a cat by its tail

I had to puzzle over that for a while like one of the Koans that my beloved deceased mother used to enjoy and had to ask Lisa what that meant.

"Well it just means that there are a lot of people in the pharmaceutical industry"

Sometimes things that are true are also so simple that you can't recognize it if it is right in front of your face. What was your face before you were born?

I have been mulling over that this week, as well as the effects of pharmalot withdrawal, which has been under consideration as a new psychiatric disorder by our DSM V Shadow Team. Related to that in an interview after the closure of pharmalot with pharmalot's Ed Silverman by BNET journalist Jim Edwards (who incidentally prompted my post about facebook "Will You Be My Friend?" after he hurt my feelings by asking why I wanted to "friend" him) Ed said that his favorite post was one about Pfizer VP for HR Mary McCleod taking a helicopter to work in Manhattan every week when the rank and file were being laid off and there was cost cutting all around. That prompted a fascinating ongoing string of comments from Pfizer employees and "stockholders" expressing their outrage interspersed with comments from people like Justice in Michigan and Jaynesday saying "Hey look, you have a conscience like us" which they of course ignored. Lisa also told me that when Pfizer employees were protesting outside of corporate headquarters in NJ that they put a giant inflatable rat outside. Here he is at another gig outside the International Longshoreman's Union in Brooklyn.

Inflatable rat

Of course that brought to mind Sen. Grassley's comment so of course I had to photoshop it, and here it is.

I wantz go sel drugz

DON LET THET RAT LEVE BIFOR A GET THER!

LOL!

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COMMENTS

Dear Doug,

Since you (me) haven't got any comments on this post, I just wanted to write and say how you I (you) love it! LOL! We love cats!

And if this doesn't fit the tune 'learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all,' I don't know what does!

What happened to that singer... oh yes! She got beat up by her boyfriend! And here in our hometown of Atlanta!

Keep up the good work!

Your greatest fan.

Me.