Tag: research funding

From STAT: A decade after the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act went into effect, requiring the results of clinical trials to be reported on the government website ClinicalTrials.gov, the government has never levied a single monetary penalty or withheld research funding under the law.

In this op-ed for The Washington Post, Katrina vanden Heuvel critiques President Trump's plan to cut funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by...

Ed Silverman at STAT reports that Congress has linked increased research funding to “fast-track” approval procedures. “By linking the extra funds to speedier approvals,...

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is increasingly shifting its research emphasis toward attempting to uncover biomarkers for “mental diseases,” which may have dramatic consequences for research and training in clinical psychology. In an article to be published in next month’s Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Marvin Goldfried outlines how the shift in funding priorities for psychological research is tied to the needs of pharmaceutical companies and the biological model in psychiatry.

So, at this national conference, Partnership with Patients, I met a bunch of "e-patient advocates," which are civil rights fighters in all the other "medical" areas. One thing I learned at that conference was that there are many "patient" advocacy opportunities. One of them is PCORI, the "Patient" Centered Outcomes Research Institute. This is theoretically an organization that funds research that people with lived experience ask for. However, the problem is that they aren't really talking to our community and we aren't talking to them. So they did this big splashy launch about "mental health as a major focus," and they said what they had figured out that mental health needed was.

My sabattical of last winter has spun off a second one. I remain uncertain of my role as a physician in a society which values pills over personal growth and change. Last summer, unplugging my life from the “American dream” seemed in order. It’s not easy to make changes with chains and weights in place. It’s not easy to think, decide and move with the financial shackles that are the bones of everyday life.

The practice of medicine in our country is being swallowed whole by a snake. The snake started with the poor, the black, the brown; the already disenfranchised of the deep south and inner cities many years ago. It was an easy sell to the better-off taxpayers. Who wants to give up money to take care of poor people?