The Carlat Psychiatry Blog

BMJ's Ten Commandments for the Ideal Physician

2012-01-06T14:15:00.000-05:00

The British Medical Journal's great blogger Richard Lehman has published the following Ten Commandments for excellent clinical practice. These are great rules of thumb for any savvy health care practitioner--but they do require that wee bit of extra work to truly understand the statistics behind the medical literature. (Hat tip to Steve Balt, MD, for sending me the link). The New Therapeutics:

On Stephen Colbert, Super PACs, and Industry-Supported CME

2012-01-05T09:18:00.002-05:00

The current New York Times Magazine carries a fascinating and quite hilarious profile of Stephen Colbert, of the Colbert Report. Colbert is well known for his parody of a know-nothing rabidly conservative Republican commentator—but according to the article he has taken his comedy into the real world, involving himself directly in those shady instruments of electioneering known as “super PACs.”

APA Threatens to Sue "dsm5watch" Website

2012-01-04T14:10:00.002-05:00

I just read Bernard Carroll's interesting post on the Health Care Renewal Blog about the latest DSM-5 brouhaha. It appears that the American Psychiatric Association has sent a "cease and desist" letter to a website critical of the DSM-5. The site was called "dsm5watch," but the APA argues that using DSM-5 in the blog title is an infringement of their trademark. The owner of the blog, Suzy Chapman

The Gig is Up: The Sunshine Act Will Include CME Payments to Doctors

2011-12-22T11:54:00.001-05:00

Those of us who have followed the progress of the implementation of the Physician Payment Sunshine Act have been acutely aware of one potential loophole: drug companies might try to hide payments to doctors for industry-supported CME activities. That’s because these payments are not "direct" payments to doctors, but rather indirect payments. In a 2007 op/ed piece for the New York Times, I

Conflict of Interest--From a Patient's Perspective

2011-12-12T16:35:00.000-05:00

This month's issue of Health Affairs carries this fascinating article (free full text) written by a woman with MS who found out her neurologist made $300,000 in speaking and promotional activities in 3 years. The writer, Maran Wolston, also happens to be a professor of medical ethics, so she renders her personal story in a particularly thoughtful way. When she first met her neurologist 5 years

Eli Lilly's "Pain TV": Are they serious?

2011-11-14T10:15:00.000-05:00

Sometimes in the CME field you come across something that seems so embarrassing for everybody involved that you just have to shake your head and wonder what they were thinking. So here is the link to Medscape's ACCME Accredited Category 1 CME activity called "Pain TV", supported by an "unrestricted educational grant" from Eli Lilly, manufacturer of Cymbalta, which recently won the FDA indication

FDA Slams Viibryd: Better Sexual Profile Claim “Not Supported by the Data”

2011-10-26T06:14:00.001-04:00

The September 2011 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry created history in two ways. First, the journal published this article written by FDA staff critically reviewing the efficacy and safety data of Viibryd, a new antidepressant that the same FDA staff had just approved. Second, it was not just any journal that published the article, but the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Why is

New Study: Biomarkers are Cool, but Nearly Useless for Predicting Alzheimer's

2011-10-11T14:01:00.000-04:00

Everybody would like to find a brain scan or a blood or spinal fluid test to predict Alzheimer's disease. Such objective tests seem inherently more reliable than the clinical interview. Recently we've seen various studies identifying biomarkers for predicting who will develop Alzheimer's. The problem is that most of the studies are merely suggestive, though they are so complex that they create a

New Feature: CME Rogue's Gallery

2011-09-09T14:09:00.000-04:00

We've been beefing up the Carlat CME Institute, a website whose mission is to support excellence in non-industry-funded CME. Our latest feature is the "CME Rogue's Gallery" in which we keep a running list of the most blatantly promotional CME programs that cross our path. Currently we are spotlighting a program funded by Mylan Pharmaceuticals to increase prescription of the MAOI EMSAM, and a

Dr. Stahl's Medical Writer Fights Back

2011-08-31T12:01:00.000-04:00