But we will do what ever it takes, including legal action, when facts are deliberately omitted, misrepresented and distorted and then willfully repeated to set the record straight.
Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer did a smear job on Peter and Dr. Fred Goodwin in Slate ...
www.slate.com/id/2190775/pagenum/all/#page_start
... for a segment on the Infinite Mind, called Prozac Nation Revisited ...
www.lcmedia.com/mind524.htm
The Infinite Mind is an award winning NPR show that has covered a wide variety of topics about the brain and cognition for over a decade with foundation funding, private donation and some corporate contributions directly generated by a production company. Of course none of that information made it into Slate piece. What's more, the piece never challenged the central thesis of the experts, are SSRIs as dangerous as many in the media have made them out to be, i.e., that they cause suicidality and suicides. Rather, as is their wont, they shift the line of attack to who has funded them, as if Goodwin (a friend and board member, something that we have made public for years) who has been ranked as one of the world's leading clinical researchers in depression and manic depression is just some industry tool.
Two can play at that game. Turns out that Lenzer has been on somewhat of a jihad against SSRIs, "reporting" on their dangers as a free lance journalist with the British Medical Journal for several years. What prompted the Slate article was likelly the fact that the Inifinte Mind segment questioned whether people in the media like her and members of Congress hyped up SSRIs dangers to the point that the number of kids taking the drugs declined and in turn suicides went up. That's a point Peter and I made in a Washington TImes article. The fact that we were targets for Lenzer, along with Fred, who has been fearless in speaking out for the safety of SSRIs in no surprise.
Neither is Lenzer's attack since she was a close ally of Peter Breggin, a vehement opponent of SSRIs who has it out for Fred Goodwin. You don't need a financial tie to be biased and Lenzer has lots of reasons to go after Goodwin and Peter. She also has plenty of bias and a track record of twisting the facts. BMJ was forced to retract one of her articles and admit she slipped court documents to trial lawyers (perhaps via Breggin) in an unethical fashion. Here is the BMJ retraction AND apology as it pertains to Lenzer's unethical and sleazy behavior.
"BMJ 2005;330:211 (29 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7485.211-a
Correction and apology, Lenzer, BMJ 330 (7481) 7Correction and apology
Eli Lilly: Correction and apology
An article by Jeanne Lenzer in our 1 January issue (BMJ 2005;330:7) reported that the US Food and Drug Administration was to review confidential Eli Lilly documents that had been sent to the BMJ by an anonymous source.
The article stated that these documents had gone "missing" during a 1994 product liability suit filed against Eli Lilly.
That statement has been the subject of a detailed investigation conducted by the BMJ following a complaint by Eli Lilly. That investigation has revealed that all of the documents supplied to the BMJ that were either Eli Lilly documents or were in the hands of Eli Lilly had in fact been disclosed during the suit.
At the end of the trial, all the documents were preserved by Court Order or were disclosed by Eli Lilly to the plaintiffs' lawyers in related Prozac claims.
The BMJ did not intend to suggest that Eli Lilly caused these documents to go missing. As a result of the investigation, it is clear that these documents did not go missing. The BMJ accepts that Eli Lilly acted properly in relation to the disclosure of these documents in these claims. The BMJ is happy to set the record straight and to apologise to Eli Lilly for this statement, which we now retract, but which we published in good faith.
The same article described Dr Peter Breggin as "the medical witness for the Wesbecker case." He was, in fact, the expert witness for the plaintiffs."Oh, and Jeannie also works for the plaintiff lawyer funded Government Accountability Project. ... no disclosure there.
As for Ms. Brownlee, she is a fellow at the New America Foundation that has funding from the Soros folks and is pushing a VA health system approach on everyone.
Now that's context for you.
