Tag: corruption

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Carl Elliott about scandals in psychiatry and the challenges faced by whistleblowers.

Researcher criticizes the many ways opposing viewpoints and dissenting voices are squashed in the field of medicine.

: A new review finds evidence of spin and the misrepresentation of clinical trials with non-significant results.

Corruption of pharmaceutical industry sponsored clinical trials identified as a “major obstacle” facing evidence-based medicine.

This piece for the Lown Institute lists 10 of the most egregious examples of profit-mongering and lack of empathy in healthcare in 2017. These examples include...

From The Globe and Mail: Doctors are making millions of dollars a year by providing independent medical evaluations of accident victims for the auto-insurance industry....

From Scientific American: The FDA seems determined to prevent the public from accessing valuable data about the safety, efficacy, and potential adverse effects of the...

From The Lown Institute: Every year, we spend $240 billion to fund biomedical research. According to a science reporter and author Richard Harris, as much as half...

From The New York Times: Tech companies are increasingly recruiting school teachers to help improve and promote their education tools in exchange for perks, including...

From BuzzFeed News: America's largest chain of psychiatric hospitals, United Health Services, is currently under investigation by at least three federal agencies including the FBI...

From The Huffington Post: Corruption is insidiously pervasive in our healthcare system and dramatically increases our health expenditures. Patients are increasingly being given unnecessary treatments...

From MinnPost: Two recent articles have exposed some of the potentially dangerous effects of alternative treatments including homeopathy and acupuncture, as well as corruption in...

From The New York Times: A new study has found that more than 80 percent of the nation's patient advocacy groups accept funding from drug...

Kaiser Health News and NPR report on the immense lobbying effort aimed at passing the "21st Century Cures" Act which would fast-track FDA approval...

“The executive who once ran the specialty pharmacy at the heart of the Valeant Pharmaceutical accounting scandal was arrested Thursday morning, along with a...

For STAT, Ed Silverman reports that Gordon Johnston, a former FDA official, has agreed to a settlement after being accused of insider trading. “Johnston,...

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, relates the story of Andrew Francesco, a boy who began taking Ritalin at age five and died from complications with Seroquel when he was fifteen. His father, a former pharmaceutical industry executive, reveals the industry’s greed in his memoir “Overmedicated and Undertreated.” Now the industry is pushing for a first-amendment right to market its drugs for off-label uses.

A massive number of meta-analyses of antidepressant clinical trials have financial conflicts of interest and are unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies, according to a review to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. Researchers also found that meta-analyses with industry ties almost never report any negative findings in their abstracts.

The Scientific American reports on a new analysis of antidepressant trials revealing that the vast majority of meta-analyses have industry links and suppress negative results.

The recent research scandals out of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Psychiatry may be alarming, but they are not new. Back in the 1990s, when the university was working its way towards a crippling probation by the National Institutes of Health (for yet another episode of misconduct (this time in the Department of Surgery), the Department of Psychiatry hosted two spectacular cases of research wrongdoing, both of which resulted in faculty members being disqualified from conducting research by the FDA.