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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 academic psychiatry 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.”
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.
Of course that brought to mind Sen. Grassley’s comment so of course I had to photoshop it, and here it is.
DON LET THET RAT LEVE BIFOR A GET THER!
LOL!
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Regarding your entry of 1/15/2009, it reminds me of my father castigating me for going into psychiatry, but I cut him off before he could provide any reasons. I assumed it was his drinking — that he didn’t like any group that would criticize him for his drinking, or the practice of drinking. I was probably right, but in retrospect, reading any daily newspaper, or walking into any bookstore – but I realize I am now embarassed for choosing the specialty, and not sticking to my guns and hanging in there for a slot in general surgery. Even though they didn’t want women back then. Turns out, their fears were wrong — that I didn’t have those children they said I would have, or drop out to get married. None of that stuff happened.
In my 50′s, I am still here wishing I would have pushed harder for that slot in surgery. I am disgusted by my psychiatry colleagues going to “drug” lunches. And, what do the studies really mean in those journals anymore — journals that I used to rip open the cover with anticipation, waiting to learn something new? These days, one can’t make heads or tails out of any of them these days with the pharmaceutical money flying around.
And, rather than cry tears that I was drubbed out of my coveted tenure track slot at the Massive Genitals by “mean girls” who wanted the slot more — if not for them, I would never have had the opportunity to practice law. Another profession my father hated. But by the time I left to practice law, medicine had reached such a low ebb, I could no longer say with any pride that I was a physician. Whereas in law school, I never could have imagined jumping the fence. There was nothing, then, that could hold a candle to practicing medicine.
Instead of crying in my soup, your blog brings humor to the pathetic state we are in. I love the photos of the cats, the reference to the mafia, to your description of your frenemy who bemoaned how publicity over pharma payments threatened his ability to give lectures funded by pharmaceutical $. You have a unique ability to cope, to speak, to stay honest in this crazy place we are in. It seems as though the membrane that kept out all the riff raff has broken, and medicine is susceptible to the ebb and flow of tides of money that could never before could have entered these doors. A place that was safe, and warm, and dry is now polluted, mean, and ugly.
While Obama has said his Administration will focus on transparency, and he has tightened ethics laws surrounding those who serve in his administration, we are promised health reform — but only to the extent that this corrupt system will serve more people. Daeschle, a dissapointing pick as the new “health czar,” himself compromised by money from health interests, and tax problems — his wife a lobbyist
— also does not seem like the person who can clean up medicine. Who will come and save us from this? At least there is Dr. Bremner to entertain us while we wait.
Your colleague,
Lynn Shepler MD JD
Well, Daeschle is gone now. Ostensibly for his failure to pay tax. Hard to imagine how such an intelligent guy could “overlook” that amount of tax. But what was more disturbing about his candidacy was all the money he has taken from health care groups. I am glad he withdrew his name from nomination. Is there anyone who is qualified who is not as compromised that Obama can nominate for the position? It seemed that the position was just a political “payback” for Daschle supporting Obama’s early bid for the presidency. But did Daschle really have the passion and the sensibilities to make the changes that we need? I’m glad he’s gone.
[...] the photoshop opportunity to have Dr. Nutt go riding into the Sunset with our very own Lolcat, We Sel Drugz, to fight these vicious English media people who are creating such a commotion. We sel drugz to da [...]