Comments on: Gimme That Old Time Religion: It’s Called Morality

By: Lisa Van Syckel

Lisa Van Syckel — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:26:23 +0000

Dr. B.,
How are my chances at receiving an invitation to Dr. Davis’s lecture in May. My Nephew is a Marine who served in Iraq, and is now being deployed to Afghanistan under the Obama plan.

By: Therapy Patient

Therapy Patient — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:07:04 +0000

You’re welcome!

By: Doug Bremner

Doug Bremner — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:14:02 +0000

Thanks, therapy patient. I just posted on this.

By: Duane Sherry

Duane Sherry — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:17:14 +0000

Doug,

Maybe after Biederman gets his butt thrown into federal prison, these boys will be even less likely to be on the take.

Seems to me that it may be “too little, too late” for some of them – I hope so.

Duane

By: Therapy Patient

Therapy Patient — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 04:11:41 +0000

Did you see this? :

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/technology/internet/26privacy.html?hp

This article discusses RealAge, a company that established a free online health quiz which has been taken by 27 million people as a result of being promoted on the Oprah Winfrey show. RealAge has carefully concealed from the public that they are a clearinghouse for direct sales emails from Pfizer, Novartis, and GlaxoSmithKline.
“At the end of the day, if you want to reach males over 60 that are high blood pressure sufferers in northwest Buffalo with under $50,000 household income that also have a high risk of diabetes, you could,” he said. (Andy Mikulak, the vice president for marketing at RealAge)

By: Doug Bremner

Doug Bremner — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:57:43 +0000

For the psychiatry field everything is dead now except for the payment to medical journals. They still haven’t fessed up about who they get money from and how much. Which illustrates the recent hypocrisy of JAMA. Other than that your list is complete. However my MD colleagues in other fields seem to think everything is business as usual and A-OK. They need to have the hammer come down on them as well.

By: Therapy Patient

Therapy Patient — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:51:52 +0000

Good. No free dinners for the “little guys”.

I hope the next step is stopping pharma-ghost-written papers, payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to influential-publishing-doctor researchers, payments to doctors who prescribe certain drugs, testing of drugs against competitor drugs which are used at less than optimal dose, payments to medical journals by pharma, etc. I am sure I have omitted a lot in that list.