But… talk about LIVING! Dr. David Feinberg himself is soaring, baby. And it takes a lot money to keep his mojo working. You don’t keep the money coming, fuck you.
… [A]t a time of … difficult financial decisions, the [UCLA] regents … [have] antagonized some critics by boosting the annual compensation of UCLA’s top hospital executive by $410,000, to about $1.3 million.
… Feinberg, UCLA’s hospital system chief executive officer, will receive a $210,000 bonus. But in a more divisive matter, UCLA officials also received the regents’ approval to give Feinberg an extra raise of about $410,000, boosting his total compensation to more than $1.3 million.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said Feinberg was doing an excellent job and was being wooed by other employers. “Keeping this team together is essential,” he said.
It’s not like Feinberg’s a doctor or anything, who feels a moral commitment to what he’s doing here. If we don’t keep not only giving this guy raises, but giving him extra raises, he’ll… he’ll leave us!
And then what’ll we do? We … we couldn’t go on without Feinberg! The team has to be kept together. And what a great team member Feinberg is, with his willingness to sacrifice for the good of the university…
Yes, it’s essential that this great team player be kept on. Essential. I’m the chancellor, and I’ve just said that to the newspapers.
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So Feinberg knows what he has to do next pay cycle. $500,000 more in bonuses, plus I’ll take an extra raise of … of… $500,000!
Okay! Anything you say.
In yet another sign of what Marcia Angell describes as “the widespread corruption of the medical profession by industry money,” a Columbia University study reveals that
Twenty-five out of 32 highly paid consultants to medical device companies in 2007, or their publishers, failed to reveal the financial connections in journal articles the following year…
Researchers followed the disclosure activities of a group of MDs and PhDs who were paid a million dollars or more by orthopedic device companies in 2007. Most of these people failed to disclose their financial conflicts of interest in the journals that published their articles.
And, as Angell points out, the journals get money from the companies too, in the form of advertisements, so they’re not about to actually enforce their disclosure policy…
Everybody’s getting paid, see. Professors at medical schools are getting paid. Journals are getting paid.
Some in this group might be getting paid twice, as it were. Ghostwriters, possibly hired by the same companies paying their consultancy fees, could be writing their articles for them…
Quelle postmodern! Simulacral research (ghost-written, guest-written), simulacral disclosure, simulacral journals…
UD‘s medical school colleagues labor over their scientific papers.
With a little help from their friends.
It’s win-win for the professors. Don’t lift a finger. Get hundreds of publication credits.
Oh. Except for:
“How many other drugs have been promoted in the same way, but you never find out about them because nobody’s suffered heart attacks?” [Leemon McHenry, a medical ethicist at California State University in Northridge] says. “Nobody finds out about this at all until there’s been some major damage and the lawsuits get filed.”
But he’s talking about the little people.
And really, if it weren’t for their doctors prescribing dangerous drugs to the little people based on ghostwritten papers, how would we find out the drugs are dangerous? That’s how science works.
Mike Williams, in Bioworld, on the popping of the genome bubble.
[The idea was that once] the new targets associated with a disease… were identified, it would be relatively easy to find active compounds and turn them into drugs … And voila – the pharma and biotech industries would be ever more productive… [But] it appears likely that much of the complexity of the human species is… in cellular events that lie beyond the genome, in the more complex epigenetic world… [T]he genome is now widely viewed as the ‘preloaded software’ of the cell…
[S]ome of the root causes of [pharma’s] productivity problems are being increasingly well-understood by industry outsiders, resulting in a perception that some of the sound bites from the Emperors running biopharma R&D reflect an absence of clothing. Optimistic declarations that a ‘golden age’ of drug discovery is with us have little basis in reality as the industry continues to consolidate and only contribute further to the ‘toxic mix of science of economics’ currently reflective of ‘an industry ripe for disruption.’
You probably already know that, in response to an Iranian cleric’s assertion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes, Jennifer McCreight, a Purdue University student, organized tens of thousands of women yesterday to bare or semi-bare their breasts at the same exact moment to see what would happen.
The Boobquake Facebook page announces the results.
Nada.
Still…
Obviously this study had its flaws. We didn’t have a large sample size, and we didn’t have a control planet where women were only wearing burkas. We didn’t have a good way to quantify how much we increased immodesty (what’s the unit of immodesty anyway? Intensity of red on blushing nuns?). Maybe women did dress immodestly, but we didn’t lead men astray enough. [The cleric says there’s a causal connection between inflamed men and plate tectonics.] Maybe God really was pissed, but he couldn’t increase earthquakes for us because that would provide proof for his existence (or maybe it’s his existence that’s the problem).
A psychiatrist writes a letter to the Psychiatric Times about the ongoing preparation of the latest edition of the DSM-V, the humongous – and always getting more humongous – reference book on which insurance company payment for mental illness treatment is based:
[T]here are a bunch of pre-conditions for DSM revision, which include among others, that the new version must not be a radical departure, and must be consistent and compatible with the existing DSM, thus guaranteeing continuity and preventing disruptions in the diagnosis and treatment of existing patients, assuring continuity in education and training for residents in psychiatry and existing practitioners, and in managed care and insurance coverage, and Treatment Guidelines and in psychiatric record-keeping, as well as research, unless we start labeling our diagnoses with vintage-like DSM numbers, like we label wines.
It is clear from the above pre-condition of continuity that there will be no significant departure from the established DSM path, and we can scratch the answer to our query, ie, “One psychiatrist” no matter how much he or she really wants to change the DSM [will be able to do so].
However, although they may consider introducing criteria to add dimensionality to designate severity, or the course of an illness, or degrees of impairment of symptoms, etc, for field-testing in accordance with the already existing studies on DSM defects, there will be no move in the direction of incorporating a brain-based, neurophysiologic paradigm, although there is a growing consensus which indicates that is the way to the future of psychiatric diagnosis. We are still impeded by our attachment to the scientific studies of the past. We appear to be rowing into the science of the future backwards, while anchored to the science of the past.
Background here.
Complete list of this year’s Ig Nobels, from BBC News:
Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
Peace: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
Biology: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant pandas.
Medicine: Donald L Unger of Thousand Oaks, California, US, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand but not his right hand every day for more than 60 years.
Economics: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa (and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy).
Physics: Katherine K Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, Daniel E Lieberman of Harvard University and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, all in the US, for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over.
Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M Castano of Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for creating diamonds from tequila.
Literature: Ireland’s police service for writing and presenting more than 50 traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country – Prawo Jazdy – whose name in Polish means “Driving Licence”.
Public Health: Elena N Bodnar, Raphael C Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, US, for inventing a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks – one for the wearer and one to be given to a needy bystander.
Mathematics: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
From a review of Prescriptions for the Mind: A Critical View of Contemporary Psychiatry, by Joel Paris:
Psychiatry’s handbook of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM ), is an obvious locus for skepticism. On the one hand, given the confusion about terminology before 1980, the DSM-III and DSM-IV at least provide a common language so that psychiatrists can better communicate with each other and with insurance companies. On the other hand, diagnostic categories are so “irredeemably fuzzy” and broadly defined that psychiatrists end up confusing “the human condition” with pathology. Consequently, prevalence rates have at times risen absurdly. Here is Paris at his best: “Perhaps the main reason for the large number of diagnoses in psychiatry is that we do not understand any of them.”
As psychiatrists gather to enlarge the profession’s enormous diagnostic manual (bitterness, shyness, apathy, being online too much, having been traumatized in some way or other — all of these, and many more, are about to be billable), let’s consider once again the work of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who died a few days ago.
In a 1967 essay, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Culture,” Kolakowski attacks what I’ll call psych-medicine (this term will cover the complex meld of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychotherapy).
Psych-medicine teaches, writes Kolakowski, that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” It “aims first and foremost at securing spiritual comfort, conditions of peace and forbearance, at protection from traumatic experiences, and, in particular, at removing … stresses.” The result, for the education of children, he continues, is disastrous: “An education thus planned leads them to expect that others will endlessly satisfy all their whims, thus exposing them to a considerably greater amount of frustration, trauma, and suffering in later life. [Psych-medicine] is effective, if one wants to deprive people of their sense of the responsibility for thinking about their own lives; it always recommends the path of least resistance, and it teaches one to be afraid of risk, chance, and competition. [Society] is [thus] exposed to the growing pressure of people who preserve the characteristics of capricious pre-school children – cowardly, selfish, and irresponsible.”
Kolakowski concludes: “A doctrine which teaches that we cannot truly be subjects is… discouraging – it teaches acquiescence in treating oneself and others as objects. And such acquiescence is what is helping to put civilization to sleep.”
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Why is the man of the American hour, maybe the man of the American century — to get at this point another way — Michael Jackson, a person who spent years scoring hospital-strength opioids so he didn’t have to exist?
Talk about putting civilization to sleep…
Half in love with easeful death?
The American dream is no longer to be Fuck-You Rich.
The dream is I’m-Dead-and-You’re-Not Rich.
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The ever-ramifying Diagnostic Manual is the bound meta-narrative of all the reasons we opiated ourselves.
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“I am only afraid,” wrote Goethe, “that the world will [eventually turn] into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”
Not too sure, though, about the humane. This blog — and many other blogs — has followed the shocking inhumanity of psychiatrists who routinely give powerful drugs to three-year-olds.
“[G]iving major tranquilizers to children,” writes David Healy, “is little different from giving children cancer chemotherapy when they have a cold.”
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Anyway, can’t say Kolakowski didn’t warn us. Yet so sickening and out of our control is the situation that our only revenge is art, as Terrence Rafferty noted recently in the New York Times.
Decades ago, he points out, in talking about the portrayal of psych-medicine people in film (he could have added novels, like the postmodern classic Crying of Lot 49, whose character Dr Hilarius is a violently demented psychiatrist), psych-med people
were accorded a certain respect, as most doctors were: they were expected to perform miracles, and their patients were duly grateful. Not any more. Hollywood’s familiarity with psychiatrists — and our filmmakers are no strangers to the couch — has bred something more like contempt, to the point where a mumbling, depressive wreck like the hero of [the new film] “Shrink” seems more the norm than the exception.
Now the psychiatrists themselves — the mumbling depressive wreck is a wildly successful Los Angeles psychiatrist — number among the dead. Having helped put civilization to sleep, they’re self-sedating.
[The film’s psychiatrist is] pretty much permanently stoned on pot (sometimes enhanced with substantial quantities of alcohol). The blank stare he trains on his patients is not a therapeutic technique, a pose of studied indifference — it’s actual indifference. [His patients consider him] an eccentric genius, using his own emotional dishevelment and brazen boredom as a radical, innovative approach to the treatment of their neuroses.
Rafferty wonders about the many contemptuous representations of the contemporary psychiatrist.
… It’s tempting to speculate, at times, on filmmakers’ motives for treating psychiatrists so rudely, to suspect that there might be just the hint of a desire for revenge on the perpetrators of their own failed, ruinously expensive adventures in self-knowledge.
And again:
… You have to wonder, really, why psychiatrists come in for so much abuse in the movies these days. Is it merely a kind of natural resentment of people who presume to understand us?
This is Kolakowski’s point, isn’t it? Psych-medicine convinces us that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” Having created this dependency, having assured us that we cannot live an autonomous examined life, the profession both shows itself actually incapable of understanding us, and at the same time capable of drugging us out of the distress our epistemological misery prompts. Those drugs are where the money is. Andrew Scull quotes Healy:
With an ever-expanding array of problems being medicalized and added to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “diseases have all but become commodities and are as subject to fashions as other commodities, with the main determinant of the fashion cycle being the patent life of a drug”.
The shrink at the center of “Shrink” is really a kind of model for us, for his patients. Fuck the adventure of insight. It’ll make you sad and anxious, like Woody Allen. Just calm yourself.
… shares the results of his study on how to motivate employees to work hard.
First, a description of his method:
The study involved giving a group of students small gifts when they came to a training session, and playing music during breaks to perk up their moods. A second group of workers, a control group run for comparison purposes, received their gifts at the end of the day and heard no music.
And now the results:
What he found was that people who were naturally upbeat and positive reacted positively to the gifts and music, and their moods became more positive. However, those who were not naturally positive actually reacted negatively to the gifts and music. Brown suspects this is because the less positive individuals are skeptical and question the motives of the experimenter.
There are thus two kinds of employees:
1.) Morons. Morons tiptap along to whatever (What did the trainer choose? Say he chose this, and some subjects began screaming. This indicates their lack of natural positiveness.). This group will also droolingly accept a keychain.
2.) Others. Others display skepticism and a tendency to analyze their surroundings. These traits point to their lack of natural positiveness.
Conclusion: Non-natural positives would have to be, I guess, subjected to more aggressive motivational procedures than natural positives. They cannot even be reached until their inclination toward critical thought has been broken down.
