The word “vulnerable” jumped out at UD when she read this eloquent opinion piece by Lawrence Diller in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Yes, child psychiatry is the branch of medicine most vulnerable to the greed and cynicism of influential professors like Alan Schatzberg and Joseph Biederman; but what does this really mean?

It means that children, and children’s delicate minds, are vulnerable. Children are dependent on the wisdom of their parents, on the integrity of physicians, and on everyone acting with caution, because, as Diller writes, “the science of children’s psychiatric medications is … primitive.”

It makes the heart sore, the thought of the intimate, unalterable damage being done to vulnerable children by intimidated parents and mercenary physicians.

…Sen. Charles Grassley’s recent revelation that Biederman did not declare $1.6 million in drug company consulting fees is … important, scary and tragic. If true, this scandal is yet one more stake in the heart of American academic medicine’s credibility with frontline doctors like me – and more importantly, with the parents of the patients I deal with every day.

American medicine, with psychiatry the most culpable, has fallen back to a time more than 100 years ago when doctor credibility was tantamount to the promotion of patent medicine. Subsequent reforms severed ties between medical school doctors and the drug industry – and for decades there was a much more ethical balance between the industry and physicians.

Now once again, drug company money is corrupting medical practice and the maintenance of our country’s health.

[A] new set of federal rules dictating the transparency and direction of such funding is desperately needed to redress a dangerously corrupt system…

… I remember about six years ago when I read a major article by the Biederman team on the advantages of a non-Ritalin drug pathway for ADHD. On the same day, much to my dismay, I also heard him give a speech – for a Wall Street audience – promoting a new drug by Eli Lilly called Strattera.

Although Strattera turned out to be a bust both clinically and commercially for ADHD, I was still shaken that such a prominent researcher could be so brazen with his potential conflict of interest appearance.

The $1.6 million that Biederman didn’t declare is only a small fraction of the full amount of research funding that his clinic receives from nearly a dozen companies that pay for not only the cost of running studies but also the salaries of the doctors involved. Virtually all doctors who receive drug company money say they are not influenced, but every independent study examining the effects of such money says they are.

The leadership of Harvard’s psychiatry department is strangely silent or even defends Biederman. These are good men with solid reputations both in drug and nondrug aspects of treatment. Yet they know that their psychiatry department would not exist were it not for drug company money – considering the withdrawal of federal research dollars over the past 25 years and the meager reimbursements that psychiatrists receive for their services from insurance companies and Medi-Cal…

The most important thing University Diaries does is track influences and trends within universities that threaten their integrity. UD has never seen anything as destructive to the ethos of the American university as she has seen here, in the relationship between medical research professors and the drug industry. It represents a species of cruelty to the most vulnerable among us that she never thought she’d see inside our schools.