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April 20, 2006
New Study Questions Experts' Independence
In a study published today in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, researchers found that over half of the 170 experts that review and revise our nation's key mental health manual had undisclosed ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
All of the experts on the panel that work on the mood and psychotic disorders sections had ties to the drug industry.
Because doctors must use codes listed in this manual to diagnose patients and provide information to health insurance companies, anyone who has input into its contents should be free from even the perception, let alone the pursestrings, of drug companies. Read more in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune or USA Today.
Comments
If the people who did the DSM excluded all the researchers who had ties to
the pharm industry, they'd be left with no experts. The way research is
done in this country is that the pharm companies fund it because the
government can't, being too busy bringing democracy to the teeming masses
yearning to breathe free in Iraq, Afganistan, Iran, North Korea, Sudan,
and so on. So, since any researcher has to have pharm money or else fund
his own research with spare change, the least he/she can do is acknowledge
it, which is required and which is why all those acknowledgements are
available. If all those researchers dried up, we'd be left with unfunded
boobs like me who would simplify the DSM into the following disorders:
Sad, Mad, Bad, Worried, Crazy, Distracted, None of the above--and that
wouldn't be sufficiently complex to occupy the legions of administrative
people who work for the insurance companies.
Posted by: Anonymous_MD | April 24, 2006 3:18 PM
I applaud your blog,mental health consumers are the least capable of self advocacy,my doctors made me take zyprexa for 4 years which was ineffective for my symptoms.I now have a victims support page against Eli Lilly for it's Zyprexa product causing my diabetes.--Daniel Haszard www.zyprexa-victims.com
Posted by: Daniel Haszard | June 2, 2006 12:23 PM