For those of you who have heard me issue calls for dialogue (not debate) on the subject of research with non-human animals — especially if you’re in the Los Angeles area — I’m pleased to announce that there’s an event coming up in February that’s aimed at fostering just such a dialogue, in the three-dimensional world. Here’s the announcement:
Category Archives: Medicine
Friday Sprog Blogging: placebo effect.
Dr. Free-Ride: Do you know what a placebo is?
Elder offspring: A placebo is something that you think works but doesn’t really work.
How to eliminate ‘any possible conflicts of interest’.
There is a story posted at ProPublica (and co-published with the Chicago Tribune) that examines a particular psychiatrist who was paid by a pharmaceutical company to travel around the U.S. to promote one of that company’s antipsychotic drugs. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist was writing thousands of prescriptions for that same antipsychotic drug for his patients on Medicaid.
You might think that there would be at least the appearance of a conflict of interest here. However, the psychiatrist in question seems certain that there is not:
Funding scientific research that people “don’t approve of”.
At Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer notes a disturbing double standard:
[T]here’s a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That’s why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I’m seeing politicians complain that research to help other drug addicts quit is a waste of money.
Maybe it’s because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts – probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them. But we should get angry about these cheap shots. A crack addict will die faster than a smoker. A crack addict can rarely hold down a job or be a parent. His/her illegal addiction poses a bigger danger to society than a smoker’s does. Most importantly, a crack addict, like a smoker, can quit. Tobacco is still a significant public health problem, and I want to do all we can to help smokers (like my mom) quit, but crack, meth, etc. utterly destroys families and communities. We should be leveraging scientific research every way we can to help these people – not throwing them away or taking shots at them because they’re “bad,” or because we can’t relate to them. They’re real people. They have families.
You should, as they say, read the whole thing.
Here, I want to pick up on the question of what kind of research the public (or the pundits trying to prod the public one direction or another) have a hard time getting behind. We’ve discussed the general issue before, and even spent a little time talking about the specific issue of research with addict populations. But we haven’t dealt head-on with the kind of objection that a segment of the American public may have, specifically, with putting up public funding to support research on the effects of drugs on people’s bodies, brains, behaviors; on effective ways to treat or manage dependence or addition; on genetic or environmental factors that might make some people more susceptible to dependence or harm.
That objection is described fairly succinctly in one of the comments on BioE’s post:
A very large and vocal swath of America views illegal drug use as a moral failing. These same people nearly always believe that those with moral failings deserve to suffer. In their eyes, anything that reduces the suffering of those with moral failings is evil. …
The problems you have described are a direct result of our culture’s long standing tradition of framing undesirable behaviors as moral failings.
Let’s consider the proposal that resistance to funding scientific research on drugs of abuse or on treatment is, at bottom, motivated by the view that taking drugs is a moral failing.
Some tactics always stink.
Abel and Orac and Isis have recently called attention to the flak Amy Wallace had been getting for her recent article in WIRED Magazine, “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All”. The flak Wallace has gotten, as detailed in her Twitter feed (from which Abel constructed a compilation):
I’ve been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a “fking lib.” I’ve been called the author of “heinous tripe.”
J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title” “Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine.” In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug. “The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit’s house must be damn good,” he wrote. Later, he sent a revised version that omitted rape and replaced it with the image of me drinking Offit’s Kool-aid. That one was later posted at the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. You can read that blog here.
I’ve been told I’ll think differently “if you live to grow up.” I’ve been warned that “this article will haunt you for a long time.” Just now, I got an email so sexually explicit that I can’t paraphrase it here. Except to say it contained the c-word and a reference to dead fish.
Since the scientific issues around vaccination (including the lack of evidence to demonstrate a link between vaccinations and autism) are well-covered in these parts (especially at Orac’s pad and by Mike The Mad Biologist), I just want to speak briefly about the strategy that seems to be embodied by these reactions to Wallace’s article.
A question for the infectious disease and public health folks.
I ended up spending a significant portion of the last several days down with something flu-like. (It included a fever and the attendant aches, chills, and sweats, as well as the upper respiratory drowning-in-my-own-mucus symptoms.)
I did not drag my ailing butt out of bed to go to the doctor and have my flu-like thing characterized. (In part, this is because I knew it would pass in a few days. In part, it was because I managed to tweak a muscle in my right side by sneezing hard and thus was unable to straighten up or be as mobile as I normally am. Someday, I swear, I am going to figure out how to sneeze more ergonomically.)
As such, I don’t know if what I had was the cool new H1N1 flu that’s been going around locally or something else.
So, here’s the question for those more plugged into public health than I am: Should I still get the novel H1N1 vaccine? (Thanks to ERV for pointing out in the comments that the “novel” is important in distinguishing the H1N1 virus that causes seasonal flu from the H1N1 virus causing the *new* swine flu.)
Psychohazard.
The other day, while surfing the web, my better half came upon this semi-official looking symbol for psychohazards:
The verbiage underneath the symbol seem to indicate conditions that might have serious consequences for one’s picture of the world and its contents, or for one’s ability to come to knowledge about the world. A philosopher who was so inclined could go to town on this.
However, while this particular icon was new to me, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the term “psychohazard” in use.
H1N1 flu on campus.
In my university mailbox yesterday I received a memo detailing measures to help prevent the spread of flu (whether seasonal or novel H1N1).
Medical ghostwriting and the role of the ‘author’ who acts as the sheet.
This week the New York Times reported on the problem of drug company-sponsored ghostwriting of articles in the scientific literature:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.
Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.
The last time I blogged explicitly about the problem of medical ghostwriting, the focus on the coverage seemed to be on the ways that such “authorship” let pharmaceutical companies stack the literature in favor of the drugs they were trying to sell. Obviously, this sort of practice has a potential to deliver “knowledge” that is more useful to the health of the pharmaceutical companies than to the health of the patients whose doctors are consulting the medical literature.
This time around, it strikes me that more attention is being paid to the ways that the academic scientists involved are gaming the system — specifically, putting their names on work they can’t legitimately take credit for (at least, not as much credit as they seem to be claiming). When there’s a ghostwriter in the background (working with the company-provided checklist of things to play up and things to play down in the manuscript), the scientist who puts her name on the author line starts moving into guest author territory. As we’ve noted before, guest authorship is, at its core, a deception.
Deception, of course, is at odds with the honesty and serious efforts towards objectivity scientists are supposed to bring to their communications with other scientists.
Lunch plate audit.
PalMD is trying to eat better (and drop a little weight). Dr. Isis has been offering some advice on what sorts of meals might help Pal cut the calories while still being healthy and satisfying. Pal has been taking the advice to heart, but finds time constraints an impediment to the kind of food he want to be eating.
As you might guess, my work and family situation give me some experience in throwing together meals under time pressure. So I wanted to offer a couple of quick recipes to Pal. But I also thought I’d page Dr. Isis to see if she’d weigh in on the nutritional punch these dishes pack (or don’t).
Here’s my lunch plate from today:
