AHRP On The FDA Commish, The Saddest Fight And Cymbalta

One of the pleasures of the mental health blogging world has been the appearance of AHRP's Vera Sharav on the scene in recent months. She's interested in more than mental health, of course, and here she is going absolutely ripshit on the FDA Commissioner, who will be appearing before Congress later today.

"Last week, at a meeting of the Center for Medicine and the Public Interest, Dr. von Eschenbach demonstrated the depth of the cultural malaise at the FDA when he defended direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs as a First Amendment right, but denied First Amendment right to his own drug safety staff experts! Dr. von Eschenbach said that he won't tolerate whistleblowers who go outside the agency just because they disagree with a final outcome."

Meanwhile, here's one of the saddest bits of bloggery I have seen. A mother trying to keep her daughter from walking into traffic. Her daughter, once thoughts to be bipolar because of wild wild mood swings, seems to have an organic brain malformation. Further consults with neurosurgeons are pending.

And, CL Psych is pounding on one of the studies used to approve Cymbalta for generalized anxiety disorder. It will be interesting to see what kind of response this drug has among patients with anxiety in the real clinical world.