… [Jonathan] Leo had first notified JAMA of problems with the study, but had heard nothing from the editors for several months. So he decided to go public. The editors said that on the day Leo posted on the Web site, JAMA was six days away from publishing a letter and detailed correction about the study. In other words, they say Leo was right, but he should have been more patient.
JAMA, you’re not looking good here.
Leo says he uncovered the conflict in a simple Google search, the kind that anyone, say, at JAMA could do in a few minutes. He wonders why JAMA took so long to confirm the information.
Good question….
Background here.
… will now investigate, via a special committee, how it came to appoint a couple of bullies to edit its journal.
… with Paul Thacker, a Charles Grassley staffer.
They ate at Two Quail, a place UD used to go to quite a lot when she lived on Capitol Hill, and which now seems to have gone out of business.
Tufts University invited Senator Grassley to speak at a conference there on conflict of interest, and because he wasn’t able to attend, he suggested to Tufts that Thacker, a specialist on the matter, attend in his place. For reasons that remain obscure, Tufts said no to Thacker.
One of the conference organizers has pulled out, in protest.
… Sheldon Krimsky, an environmental-policy professor at Tufts who is co-chairman of the university’s Committee on Ethics…. wrote [in an email message] that he had recused himself after feeling his role as organizer had been “compromised,” and the university’s commitment to academic freedom diminished, by the refusal of Tufts administrators to accept Mr. Thacker’s presence.
Bravo, Krimsky. Just because some of what Thacker says at the conference will embarrass your university doesn’t mean university officials should bar speakers and shut down discourse. Major black mark for Tufts. If I were Grassley, I’d take another look at my schedule and figure out some way of attending this conference.
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Update: An insider’s account, from the excellent Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
… a powerful writer, gets to the core of a complex situation. This is from today’s San Francisco Chronicle:
… Virtually all researchers say they are not influenced by drug company money. Doctors rarely out-and-out lie about their research, but spin influences how a study is set up, its statistical analysis and interpretation. Research on drug studies repeatedly shows that drug trial results are tilted toward a positive description of the drug’s effects when the research is funded by a drug company rather than the government or an independent agency.
Big Pharma money is most powerful when promoting [Joseph] Biederman‘s research and point of view over competing models. Drug companies copy and mail his important papers on psychiatric drugs to every American physician working with children. A member of the Biederman team is at every important meeting on children’s psychiatric issues and medical education. Their presence, and often the conference, itself, are supported by drug industry dollars.
Only when children die or side effects are severe – as in the FDA hearings on children and antidepressants in 2004, and in the recent publicity over obesity and diabetes caused by the bipolar drugs – do opposing viewpoints get the country’s eyes and ears.
Biederman’s conflict of interest problems have exposed his strong pro-drug views to the public for scrutiny. Until now, fear of the Biederman team has operated quietly on the small club of child psychiatric researchers. Only when 2-year-olds started taking three psychiatric drugs simultaneously under a Biederman protocol for bipolar disorder did the emperor’s clothes become so invisible as to begin the naming of names…
Two-year-olds on three drugs simultaneously. Jesus.
… at the Alliance for Human Research Protection, who have written a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association people asking for Bonnie and Clyde to be let go.
A nonprofit group that monitors industry links to medical research called for the suspension of the top two editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and an investigation into allegations that they threatened a researcher who criticized a study published in the journal.
The Alliance for Human Research Protection, which is often critical of industry-academic ties, made the requests in a letter it sent Wednesday to the AMA and the journal, also known as JAMA.
“We are deeply concerned about the unbecoming and unethical conduct of the editor in chief and executive deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, who were reported to have used unprofessional and intimidating tactics against a conscientious academic,” the alliance wrote in a letter requesting the investigation. Many doctors and academics have criticized JAMA’s reaction to the academic, Jonathan Leo, on Internet blogs recently.
The AMA and JAMA said they were reviewing the letter and declined further comment. Jordan J. Cohen, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, who is chairman of JAMA’s oversight committee, hasn’t returned telephone and email messages this week…
Perhaps Cohen hasn’t returned calls because he’s too busy dealing with his medical school being on probation.
It’s the only med school in the United States on probation.
Between the JAMA editors and the unresponsive Jordan Cohen, I’m truly beginning to wonder about this organization.
Background on the come an’ git me, coppers! editors of JAMA here.
… ass? Merkins aren’t made for that purpose.
Thus Ezra Merkin’s attempt to cover his ass in the Madoff matter by having his sister write a New York Times opinion piece minimizing his involvement was doomed to fail.
Yet the real question is how she managed to get the piece published at all. It’s rank conflict of interest, an attempt by a protective sister to twist the facts of her brother’s culpability.
Gawker and the Jewish Journal, among others, have expressed amazement at what looks to UD like simple corruption on the part of the NYT. Daphne Merkin’s a longtime contributor to the newspaper, no doubt a friend of some on the editorial board, and they’re doing a friend a favor by letting her try to influence the many lawsuits currently being filed against her brother.
It’s disillusioning for poor UD. She never thought of the New York Times as a provincial newspaper.
… of God.
Everyone’s picking up on Joseph Biederman’s statement in a recent deposition that the rank after full professor is God.
Everyone’s dumping on him because he’s so arrogant as to have said that.
But while there’s every reason to abhor Biederman for his perversion of science, I’m not sure this lame attempt at humor merits the attention it’s gotten. Like a lot of people who end up in courtrooms and Grassley Letters, Biederman’s a twisted character for sure. The fact that he can be sophomoric under pressure, though, seems to UD neither here nor there.
Unfortunately for him, it’s an easy sound bite to sink your teeth into.
Alison Bass tells you why.
The second commenter on the post adds an important point.
… for Harvard.
If I were a pharma boy toy, I wouldn’t want anyone to know about it either.
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Update: The story’s spreading like one of Biederman’s Harvard-affiliated ad campaigns for drugs that fuck up little kids.
… to this post, in which Carl Elliott warns of the money-motivated, sometimes catastrophic rush toward “recruiting patients into studies as quickly as possible.”
A law professor at Georgia State has discovered that many medical schools seem to have no policy at all in regard to finder’s fees:
Although paying finder’s fees to researchers and clinicians to identify study participants could compromise the recruitment process and harm human lives, many medical schools fail to address this conflict of interest in their Institutional Review Board (IRB) policies.
Leslie Wolf, an associate professor of law at Georgia State University, studied the IRB policies posted on the Web sites of 117 medical schools that received National Institutes of Health funding. Among the study’s findings, Wolf revealed that less than half of the IRB policies discuss finder’s fees or bonus payments as conflicts of interest, where research sponsors pay members of the research team or clinicians to identify potential participants or for meeting predetermined enrollment targets.
“Since IRBs must review research protocols, and also are in a position to educate investigators about these issues, I thought their policies were an important place to look,” Wolf said. “I thought they would have tried to address it more frequently than they did. That’s a gap in IRB guidance.”
Finder’s fees raise concern because researchers and their colleagues may be tempted to enroll individuals in studies for which they are ineligible, Wolf said.
Wolf is also concerned that only 26 of the IRBs in the study mentioned potential conflicts when physicians recruit their own patients and that only four percent ask doctors to tell their patients that they are not obligated to participate.
via The Chronicle
…voices against greed and corruption in American medical schools, will be speaking at George Washington University tomorrow.
Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm
GWU-SPHHS Health Policy Department
2021 K St. NW, Ste. 800, Washington, DC
Bass understands the complex, far-reaching conflict of interest scandal as well as anyone, and writes compellingly about it. If I were in DC, I’d take the middle seat in the front row.
From New York magazine:
… Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot, which Ezra passed along to Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.
Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. The university required nothing more than that those who served on the investment committee disclose that they were doing business with the university. The 2003 disclosure to the board, a copy of which was obtained by New York Magazine, reported that Ezra was managing about 10 percent of Yeshiva’s endowment through four different funds. For his efforts, he collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone.
That 2003 memo stated that Madoff was Ascot’s “executing broker,” a term that means he was executing buy and sell orders, supposedly those dictated by Ascot. In fact, though Merkin looked at Madoff’s statements every month, and they were detailed and thorough, and questioned him about his accounts, he left the trading—or, as we now know, lack thereof—to Madoff.
Some now wonder about the propriety of the chairman of the investment committee’s taking fees for simply passing along money to Bernie—especially since Bernie was elected to Yeshiva’s board of trustees in 1996, when Hermann served as vice-chairman. Why not just give the money directly to Bernie and save Yeshiva the fee? To some, it seemed like Ezra was skimming profits, and from an institution he loved…
Yeshiva University: Dollar for dollar, more conflict of interest than all other American universities combined. And there’s absolutely no indication that it’s operating any differently now.
Today, Emory; tomorrow, maybe you.
…Within a few months, officials plan to file civil and criminal charges against a number of surgeons who they say demanded profitable consulting agreements from device makers in exchange for using their products.
… The move against doctors is part of a diverse campaign to curb industry marketing tactics that enrich doctors but increase health care costs and sometimes endanger patients. Taken together, the new measures are likely to transform the relationship between medicine and industry.
… Also, as part of plea bargains, federal health officials are forcing a growing number of drug and device makers to post publicly all payments made to doctors who serve as consultants or speakers. Manufacturers have repeatedly used consulting payments in illegal schemes to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs or devices in inappropriate and unapproved ways, according to federal charges.
… [T]he United States attorney said officials hoped to send a strong message to doctors. “I have been shocked at what appears to be willful blindness by folks in the physician community to the criminal conduct that corrupts the patient-physician relationship,” he said.
New York Times