1
1
1
Back on June 18, 2008, Dr Bruce Levine, author of, "Surviving America's Depression Epidemic," issued a warning in an Alternet commentary. "If those physicians who are not drug-company shills want to save their profession they might want to start taking aggressive actions against their colleagues who are on the take," he said.
"Perhaps it will help motivate clean physicians to be reminded that history shows that any institution -- no matter how large and powerful -- can arrogantly cross those lines leading to its demise," he advised.
On the Health Care Renewal website, Dr Bernard Carroll, former head of Duke's psychiatry department, says the leaders of the major professional and scientific organizations, like the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Psychiatrists, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the Society of Biological Psychiatry, may not be stepping up to the plate publicly because "perhaps they are confounded by the awkward fact" that some of the exposed individuals "are current and past presidents of these very organizations."
They may also be confounded by the "awkward fact," that all the medical journals, textbooks and other literature put out by the so-called "professional" groups in the field of psychiatry are filled with ghostwritten infomercials, fraudulently crediting the shills on Grassley's list as authors, with major universities following their names, and nothing short of a mass book burning event will erase all the false advertising.
About a year ago, Grassley asked eight leading medical journals to describe their policies and practices regarding ghostwriting as part of a "broader effort to establish transparency with regard to financial relationships between the pharmaceutical industry and medical professionals," according to his July 2, 2009 press release.
In a June 16, 2010, letter to the editor of the Miami Herald, Dr John Nardo, a former faculty member in Emory's Department of Psychiatry, alluded to this problem while complaining about the fact that the University of Miami has "hired a a chairman for the Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Charles Nemeroff, who has become the poster child for what's wrong with academic medicine in our country."
"Nemeroff was relieved of his chairmanship at Emory University in Atlanta for failing to disclose conflicts of interest in his publications and presentations," he said. "That means that he was a well-paid frontman for a number of drug manufacturers."
"Now it has been revealed that many of his articles were ghost-written by the drug companies and that he recommended a drug, Paxil, as safe for pregnant women when, in fact, it can cause congenital heart defects in newborns," Nardo wrote.
"One has to wonder what the people at UM are thinking?" he said. "Or if they're thinking at all?"
Nardo's letter is related to the latest scandal, in the seemingly never-ending Charles Nemeroff saga, which now involves the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, who apparently worked behind the scenes to help Nemeroff get hired at the University of Miami, after he was kicked off the chair of psychiatry thrown at Emory, according to a June 6, 2010, article by Paul Basken in the "Chronicle of Higher Education."
Bernard Carroll, who was Nemeroff's boss for over 6 years while Nemeroff was a professor at Duke, says Nemeroff probably called in some markers. Because back in 1994, Nemeroff found Insel a position at Emory when Insel was facing nonrenewal of a research job at NIMH. And, in addition to being Insel's boss at Emory, Nemeroff also lobbied for Insel's appointment as NIMH director, and soon after Insel moved to the NIMH, he appointed Nemeroff as an advisor, Carroll says.
In a November 5, 2009, press release, UM announced Nemeroff's hiring and described him as "one of the world's leading experts in the field of psychiatry."
Although not a peep was said about his fall from grace or the problems Nemeroff caused at Emory, the release stated: "He moved to Emory in 1991 as chairman of psychiatry. There he took an average department to become one of the top ten in the country."
On January 4, 2010, Ed Silverman posted a Pharmalot blog under the title, "Charles Nemeroff and the House That Glaxo Built," with a link to a December 30, 2009, headline for a story by BlockShopper, in South Florida, that read: "Psychiatrist spends $1.91M on Miami 6BD."
"Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff and Gayle Nemeroff bought a six-bedroom, seven-bath home at 1780 Espanola Dr. in Miami from David and Carolyn Shulevitz for $1.91 million on Dec. 4, " BlockShopper reported.
In addition to pointing out that Nemeroff had taken a new job at UM, Silverman wrote, "the new home appears big enough to house plenty of consulting materials."
