The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Snake oil comes in many guises, most of which exist to reduce the contents of one’s purse.  Last week an Associated Press writer detailed how the government spent $2.5 billion of our money to test various so-called alternative health remedies, most of which would be considered snake oil by mainstream medicine, and came up virtually empty handed.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

Acupuncture and some of the hands-on manipulative therapies fared a little better. Read more »

I’ve made mention in these pages numerous times of the dubious practice of medical researchers being on the payrolls of the pharmaceutical industry.  I’ve known about these shady alliances for my entire career, but what I didn’t know was just how lucrative they were for the researchers involved.  This past weekend both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times reported on drug company payments to a prominent Emory University psychiatrist and researcher and former editor of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

Senator Charles Grassley (R. Iowa) is probing into this mess because any federally-funded research is supposed to free of financial conflicts of interest.  Enforcement of these rules is usually left to the universities employing the researchers, which are apparently easily flim flammed by the researchers involved.  In the specific case reported by both papers, the Emory researcher Dr. Charles Nemeroff, was instructed by Emory not to take more than $10,000 per year from GlaxoSmithKline, the drug company for whom he was doing research on their bestselling antidepressant drug Paxil.  But despite his assurances to Emory that his income from Glaxo was within the limits, Dr. Nemeroff’s take was just a little more. Read more »