I have a friend who experiences nerve symptoms and huge emotional changes (to me, she acts like her old self instead of a drugged out zombie) if she misses two days of Cymbalta. I don’t know if her doctor knows about the nerve symptoms, or just dismisses them, but the doc keeps giving her the thumbs up for continuing on it. He’s the same one that put her on a high blood pressure pill, instead of mentioning a diet change. But then again, if people actually changed their diet to lower carb, so many of today’s ills would go away, and the captive audience would vanish.

Just to be clear I take back the part about people who don’t do drug talks being losers; in my defence I previously posted on my blog that I don’t give talks, and the reasons why, so I didn’t really mean that, I guess I was just having a bad hair day or something.

I think that Sen Grassley is picking on a field that is lowest in the opinion polls in the US, so that will help his ratings. I mean look at how the guidelines for statins were written by a committee rife with COI– telling women with risk factors to take statins, when there is no benefit. Just one example.

I never realized that psychiatrists were held in such low esteem. When I went to medical school, I was so impressed by the staff psychiatrists I worked with that I almost switched from surgery to psychiatry.

MRE

However, when I was attacked by a drug company, Nemeroff was the ONLY person at Emory to come to my defense

http://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/blog.thml

I think you need to take personal character into account before you rush to judgment. He had NO personal incentive to defend me. He did it out of principle.
And in fact he and EVERYONE at Emory was nervous by my behavior. In fact Emory refused to issue a press release about my book.
I have some questions for the Senator.

First off, why are you only investigating psychiatrists? [Answer: psychiatrists have an approval rating in medicine that is only above chiropractors. Many people blame paxil for their problems. It is low hanging fruit]

Second, why don’t you look at other specialties? Take a look at cafepharma.com, where the drug reps are gossiping in relation to the Nemeroff dispute that “key opinion leaders” for advair are at the front of the gravy train. [Answer: cardiologists make life saving drugs, while psychiatrists are pseudoscientists who are trying to invent a myth about serotonin imbalance so they can help sell drugs for their cronies, the drug companies.] [Answer to answer: Not true. You have to treat 100 heart disease patients with Lipitor to prevent one heart attack, while you treat only 8-17 depressed patients with an antidepressant to prevent a recurrence. And if you don't believe that depression is as bad as a heart attack, ask someone who has been there.]

Ask anyone who works in a university hospital. If their docs have any talent, they are never there. It is because they are always away giving talks for pharma. And pretty much all of it is undisclosed. The ones who are complaining about it are the losers who pharma doesn’t want to lecture for them anyway.

Senator Grassley, if you really want to get to the bottom of the corruption that has permeated academic medicine, do a nation wide audit. Of ALL specialties. If you don’t, you are a hypocrite.
http://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/blog.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bremner/deposition-x-or-pages-fro_b_100931.html

Doug Bremner MD
http://www.dougbremner.com

Hi Dr. Bremmer–

MRE

Yea, that Biederman scuz box is behind the “childhood bipolar disorder” epidemic. It’s pretty shameful. The parents report the symptoms. Any normal person would say “oh this is a child with extreme emotional reactions and the parents can’t deal with it”. Almost all of the kids were on stimulant drugs before hand, any sane reasonable person would assume that the symptoms these children are experience are from being given speed. Reason will not get in the way of profit!
It’s a huge money maker for the drug companies because once you diagnose bipolar in a kid, you’ve got to pile on the drugs, and then more drugs for the side effects of those drugs, and more drugs for the side effects of those drugs. That’s why they’re padding his pockets so, because this is a gold mine.

I think psychiatry is the most scamming and unscrupulous pocket of medicine… this has always been traditional of psychiatry, when patients had no power at all and drs behaved like nazi physicians toward concentration camp prisoners. That vestige of inhumanity is with the field even today. Doctors are free to do whatever they want to patients without the slightest scrap of biological evidence. There’s less respect, less concern for the patient in psychiatry… most of the concern is for the people the patient has to live with (family, society). A patient is doing well if they aren’t making problems. If they gain 100 pounds and develop diabetes and are too tired to stay awake during the day, this doesn’t matter.

I see your point, but I have to say that I’ve known and worked with some excellent psychiatrists who helped their patients greatly. You can’t tar the entire profession with the same brush you use for a few bad apples.

The intended purpose of the study was to determine whether the 4 diets (Atkins, Weight Watchers, SlimFast, Conley [?] ) can be considered “safe” in terms of meeting nutritional requirements when followed for 8 weeks. All were found safe. The difference in weight loss was not statistically significant although the Atkins group lost the most on average.

Most interestingly, the decrease in mean energy intake was only 30% for the Atkins group but 37 or 38% for the other three.

Yep. A pretty typical finding in these kinds of studies.

I have it, but I haven’t read it yet.

Thanks for the kind words.

You’ve got to be careful relying on the advice from Quackwatch.com. As I recall, those guys bashed low-carb diets in the past.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7655405.stm

God help us all. Does this bozo not realize that insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia drive levels of IGF-1 up much, much more than does the intake of meat? Since meat seems to be the whipping boy for just about everyone these days, I guess any finding about anything has got to be tied to meat intake for it to have meaning.

As I wrote to the previous commenter, pre-Westernized Eskimos didn’t have cancer. Stefansson did exhaustive research, contacting physicians who treated Eskimo populations in the mid 1800s, looking up medical records of Eskimos from the wild who made their way into hospitals, talking to Eskimo healers, and searching the record every way possible and could find no instance of an Eskimo having or being treated for cancer. He wrote an entire book on the subject titled: Cancer: Disease of Civilization? I’ve had a copy of this book for years (an actual copy; one I made on a copy machine of the book obtained from my university’s interlibrary loan), but I finally found an available copy a couple of years ago that I forked over $250 for. If the Eskimos, who ate an almost 100 % meat diet made of all kinds of meat, didn’t have cancer then, I doubt that red meat eaten occasionally is going to give it to us now.

Brian.

Cancer was unknown among the pre-Westernized Eskimos. Stefansson wrote an entire book about it. And the Eskimos ate no apricots, but ate almost 100 percent meat. I would view with real suspicion anything written about the Hunza.

In my opinion, the people who promote a lot of the stuff one finds in alternative medicine are no better than the mainstream people. The alternative medicine folks are, if anything, even less tolerant. They don’t brook any dissent to what they consider the real truth. And they are always hiding behind the notion that their theories are suppressed by the mainstream because no one will study them. And if someone does study them, and they are found to be lacking, then the cry is that the studies were substandard. While it is true that the financial incentive to study vitamins (which can’t be patented) is not as great as the financial incentive to study drugs, there are plenty of studies of vitamins out there. One just has to do a PubMed search on any vitamin to see what I mean.