Biederman “single-handedly put pediatric bipolar disorder on the map,” convincing doctors to diagnose it in children and to medicate them with anti-psychotic drugs.
A recent New York Time article reflects yet again the rampant ethics problems surrounding the unholy alliance between Big Pharma and the medical research establishment.
This time, it’s a big-time medical university psychiatrists not reporting “consulting fees” from Big Pharma as required by the government and the universities.
The Times articles states: “By failing to report income, the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, and a colleague in the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Timothy E. Wilens, may have violated federal and university research rules designed to police potential conflicts of interest, according to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Some of their research is financed by government grants.”
Although the shrinks were paid by Big Pharma, the research was paid for by our tax dollars through National Institutes of Health grants. The institute says “if research integrity has been compromised — we will take all the appropriate action within our power to hold those responsible accountable.” Oh sure, like the NIH doesn’t know that Big Pharma is lining the pockets of researchers, and that this is a huge red flag that should always be investigated or, better, never allowed at all.
Both shrinks, Biederman and Wilens, belatedly reported receiving at least $1.6 million between 2000 and 2007. And after being pressed by Grassley’s investigators, another Harvard researcher, Dr. Thomas Spencer, admitted getting $1 million.
According to Grassley, the doctor’s disclosures may understate their income, because some of their reported fees have already proven far less than what Big Pharma reports paying them.
The real problem for the rest of us, the public, the patients, and even our duped doctors across the country and the world, is that these are the very doctor-slash-researchers who single-handedly created the massive avalanche of dangerous antipsychotic medicines being pushed on children over the past decade — a use of the drugs that the FDA, and even Big Pharma itself, recommended against.
Bruce Levine at Alternet goes so far as to say: “What Dick Cheney is to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, psychiatrist Joseph Biederman is to the explosion of psychiatric medications in American children.”
Of course the Harvard doctors vehemently deny their “consulting fees” in any way influenced their favorable findings for drugging infants and kids with antipsychotics.
But from our perspective, it looks like yet another example of how greasing the right palms in the academic research community buys favorable research findings, expanding Big Pharma’s market for a drug, and to hell with patient safety.