JANUARY 14, 2009

Put it Back

I have been mulling over my

conversation with David Braff MD PhD, President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), about how my fellow ACNP members were miffed about my post "A Dissenting Opinion from the ACNP on Suicidality and Antidepressants". Although I applaud the psychiatrist blogger Daniel Carlat MD's efforts to provide medical education that is not supported by the pharmaceutical industry (for those out of the game pretty much ALL education is industry funded, often through private companies that are front organizations for pharma), I thought that his essay in the New York Times about being a reformed industry funded speaker was a bit of a disservice since it focuses on psychiatry and glosses over the vast extent of pharma payments to academic physicians for talks and consulting that plays a very real role in disrupting the physician patient relationship. After all, after the recent broo ha ha at Emory the main thing is that my colleages in other departments like Medicine are grumping about how the publicity is going to effect their outside income from pharma. Anyhoo, I was a bit miffed when Dr. Carlat called my former Chair at Emory Dept of Psychiatry names. I mean, I may make fun of organizations like the ACNP, but I don't call people names (usually). It was a deliberate decision not to name the person at the ACNP who drew his poster title with a crayon and the other one who sat in a lawn chair next to his poster criticizing another ACNP member in my recent post on the ACNP. Dr. Carlat, on the advice of his advisory board, took back his comment, but then when the publicity came out, regarding his previous comment he said...

Put it Back

All this talk about conflicts and name calling is stressing me out. Time to take a breather at one of my favorite web sites, lolcats.

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