Some Days are Busier than Others...

A light day of posting. The ebb and flow of a school. This is the time of year of midyear reports and college recommendations. And some kids get kind of house buggy.
Enjoy your weekend...

Integrity Alert!

If the health care system is going to be reformed, than the quality of our research must be improved. And transparency is essential. Dan Carlat has long been on this issue:

It looks like Dr. Charles Nemeroff has found a way to wriggle out of the already loose leash clapped around his neck by Emory University.

For those who have forgotten about Dr. Nemeroff’s recent trials and tribulations, here’s a brief recap. He was the principal investigator of a $3.95 million NIH grant to study several drugs by GlaxoSmithKline. But he was at the same time making hundreds of thousands of dollars doing promotional talks for the same company...

Worth watching over the next few weeks...

(from Furious Seasons) Yesterday, I noted that CNN's chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon, was expected to be named Surgeon-General of the US by President-Elect Barack Obama. I noted that I had concerns because Gupta struck me as a lightweight as a reporter--and I am in a position to make that kind of judgment--and that he had openly supported the use of the HPV vaccine Gardasil, well in advance of its FDA approval, and that he downplayed the risks of Vioxx, months before the drug's maker took the drug off the market and months before thousands of lawsuits erupted around the drug and how its risks were hidden by Merck.

I noted that I didn't want Gupta anywhere around mental health issues if he had such a track record of being wrong and intellectually incurious, but I hadn't been able to track down how Gupta had handled issues like depression and anti-depressants and suicide while at CNN. I've now rectified that and it is clear that Gupta screwed up his reporting on anti-depressants and suicide in 2004, ignoring evidence that was available to him before he went on-air.

In late 2003, Britain banned the use of anti-deperssants, excepting Prozac, in children under 18 years due to reports of suicides and suicidality. But nine months later, here's our Surgeon-General-to-be claiming children haven't committed suicide on these drugs. From Sept. 15, 2004 on CNN's "American Morning:"

Onward, research...

The UK has launched its first bank of donated brain tissue samples dedicated to autism research. The Brain Bank for Autism in Oxford should reveal more detail on cellular and molecular changes during the development of the disorder than brain scans alone. Such a bank already exists in the US.