Forms & Function

The New York Times reports that,

"A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators."

Point One: How did a phrase like "fuel an explosion" make it past an editor? This is journalism?

The Times continues,

"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."

Okay - that's the genesis of the story - Drs. Biederman and Wilens didn’t fill out their disclosure forms properly. They should know better. Transparency is a serious business that needs to be taken seriously - and they deserve to be taken to task for their bureaucratic ineptitude.

That's what Senator Grassley is upset about - and it serves as a timely anecdote in support of the physician sunshine legislation he's pursuing. But there are other agendas at play here - and Senator Grassley is being played (unwittingly one hopes) like the proverbial violin. When it comes to Conflicts of Interest, its COI polloi.

The not-so-hidden agenda is that anyone who supports the use of psychiatric pharmaceuticals for any reason needs to be humiliated and destroyed.

In that respect this is all about a new definition of R&D. Now it means RICO and Destruction.

Here's how the Times smoothly segues into this, far more nefarious story,

"The Harvard group's consulting arrangements with drug makers were already controversial because of the researchers' advocacy of unapproved uses of psychiatric medicines in children."

Already controversial? Really? According to whom? The Times doesn't every really say. The article's only mysteriously refers to”experts," as in "experts say." Maybe they're part of the New York Times expert witness protection program.

And the one person they do quote represents an activist group with an anti-medication agenda,

"Longtime critics of the group see its influence differently. "They have given the Harvard imprimatur to this commercial experimentation on children," said Vera Sharav, president and founder of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, a patient advocacy group."

This despite the fact that deeper in the story the Times casually mentions that, "The Grassley investigation did not address research quality."

There's a lot of that going on. A lot of what the Grassley investigation did not address. To wit, the Times adds that, "Lawmakers have been concerned in recent years about the use of unapproved medications in children and the influence of industry money."

And consider this paragraph,

"In the last 25 years, drug and device makers have displaced the federal government as the primary source of research financing, and industry support is vital to many university research programs. But as corporate research executives recruit the brightest scientists; their brethren in marketing departments have discovered that some of these same scientists can be terrific pitchmen."

Another example of amazingly bad editing. Marketing department "brethren?" "Terrific pitchmen?" Do these words belong in a news story outside of third party quotations?

Somebody should bring this to the attention of the New York Times Ombudsman.

The goal of Vera Sharav and her "brethren" is to scare away any research grants from anyone who supports the use of pharmaceutical treatment for psychiatric disorders. Let's face it, this story didn't come up because Senator Grassley's staff was looking at disclosure forms alphabetically and just happened to reach the Bs. There's no such thing as a coincidence when it comes to an opportunity to attack top tier researchers who accept pharmaceutical industry funding.

Unable to win on merit, activists go to motives. And the article seems to fall all over itself going back and forth between referring to how "world renowned" Bierderman and Wilens are while repeating and magnifying the insinuation made by the skeptics that, "for money," world class researchers are willing to aid and abet greedy pharmaceutical companies, "disease mongering" to create a Brave New World.

Here's a link to the complete story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/us/08conflict.html?scp=1&sq=biederman&st=nyt

Harvard Medical School has a new dean, and it'll be interesting and informative to see how he deals with this -- defend his faculty or go the PC CYA route. The pro forma response of most academic institutions (Mass General included) has been to hunker down when members of their own faculty are insulted by activists and the news media – letting them take the abuse in silence rather than vigorously defending them. We'll see.

Consider the comments of the only named "expert," Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, the executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute. It isn't even a comment on the quality of the Biederman/Wilens research. "In the area of child psychiatry in particular, we know much less than we should, and we desperately need research that is not influenced by industry money."

Certainly more money is needed - but why is government money any better than industry money? Should perception, rather than data, drive science? That's the agenda. It's frightening.

And so is McCarthyism.