Psychs Feeling The Pressure Of Bad Media Over Unreported Payola « Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

April 30, 2009

Psychs Feeling The Pressure Of Bad Media Over Unreported Payola

Filed under: Big Pharma, pharmaceutical giants, pharmaceutical sales, pharmaceuticals — Rod Malcolm @ 2:02 pm

A featured topic at the 2009 International Forum on Mood and Anxiety Disorders conference in Monaco is “Making sense of media attacks on experts: is this a wanton witch hunt?” If the shoe fits . . .

Several prominent psychiatrists have been receiving seriously negative media lately following Congressional revelations that they failed to disclose payments from Big Pharma for “studying” various drugs and promoting them around the country.

For some background from earlier blogs about non-disclosure of millions of Big Pharma payola bucks, go here and here and here and here.

The Alison Bass blog reports this week that “some of these key opinion leaders (KOLs as they are known in the industry) are pushing back, accusing the press of launching a ‘witch-hunt’ and trying to intimidate some of the media messengers.”

Evidence of the growing unease among psychs about the negative publicity is a featured topic at the 2009 conference of the International Forum on Mood and Anxiety Disorders in Monaco in November. Titled ‘Making sense of media attacks on experts: is this a wanton witch hunt?’ the forum is “essentially an ‘astroturf creation’ of Pharma directed by two prominent psychiatrists with industry ties in Europe,” Ms. Bass reports.

The Forum’s speaker list includes Alan Schatzberg, who claims his stepping down from the psychiatry chair at Stanford has nothing to do with the media blitz over his own failure to disclose financial ties to Big Pharma, revealed by the Congressional investigative team run by Sen. Chuck Grassley. Turns out Schatzberg owned $4.8 million in stocks in Corcept Therapeutics, a company he co-founded, while operating as principal investigator of a NIH-funded study of Corcept’s own drug for depression.

Stanford did not fully disclose Schatzberg’s stock ownership until The New York Times, Business Week and other media reported the story. Shortly thereafter Stanford asked Schatzberg to step down as principal investigator of the NIH study — NIH prohibits its grant money from being blended into Big Pharma personal payola. And now, says Ms. Bass, Stanford is looking for a new chair of its psychiatry department, although they claim that Schatzberg decided to step down long before the conflict of interest story broke. Yeah, sure.

Meanwhile, says Ms. Bass, Shatzberg and Stanford have been berating various media for continuing to discuss the situation: the New York Review of Books for running Marcia Angell’s medical corruption article which included Schatzberg’s financial conflicts); CBS, which covered the Stanford problems; and the Corporate Crime Reporter, which published an interview with Ms. Bass about conflicts of interest in medicine. In spite of demands for corrections from the doctor and the university, none has been issued.

A few years ago, Schatzberg sued University of Massachusetts psychiatrist Anthony Rothschild, alleging that Rothschild libeled and defamed him by claiming on a Yahoo message board under an assumed name that Schatzberg was using his position at Stanford to promote Corcept’s new drug, and that he and his cofounder both knew since 2005 that the drug didn’t work, yet they continued to sell company stock. (Corcept stock has dropped from over $8 five years ago to around 90 cents.)

Rothschild and Schatzberg have an interesting back-story, reports Ms. Bass. In the late 1980s, while both were at Harvard’s McLean Hospital, they began working on the idea of using a drug to block the stress hormone cortisol as a possible treatment for depression. Then Schatzberg went to Stanford in 1991, and took the idea with him, co-founding Corcept to develop the new drug. Partners, which owns McLean Hospital, sued Stanford over the patent for Corcept’s drug, but the case was settled in mediation.

“What all this shows is that Schatzberg is not afraid to throw lawyers at his critics,” Ms. Bass suggests. “I wonder if that’s the kind of aggressive action he’ll advise at the wanton witch-hunt session in Monaco. What I want to know is: who’s paying for his trip there?”

Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

April 30, 2009

Psychs Feeling The Pressure Of Bad Media Over Unreported Payola

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