12-28-2007 Media Madness

I hope all of your had a nice Christmas. I've been working my butt off at the shelter and haven't had much time for writing per se. But I wanted to pass along a few items that caught my eye recently.

First, CBS News took on the whole Chantix suicidality connection the other day, and encountered one woman without a mental health history who suddenly tried to kill herself while on the stop smoking pill. I hope the FDA plans to rule soon on whether the drug requires black box warnings in the US, as both Europe and Australia have already determined that it does. Why the FDA moves slower than other nations' regulatory bodies is beyond me. Or do they allow their own data to be used to protect citizens of other countries but not of our own?

Remember that paper I posted last week in which a researcher had analyzed Lilly's pain alleviation data for Cymbalta and found that the company inflated the effects of the drug and that its pain-treating effects were almost nil? I had a hunch we'd hear more about that paper and I was right. The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog has taken on the topic and quotes Lilly as defending the drug and its data. It also quotes the study's author referring to Lilly's pain alleviation claims: "I think it’s certainly misleading at best, and completely false at worst." I guess the real question that needs to be asked now--in light of what seemed to me to be an authoritative analysis of Lilly's data--is how the drug could have been approved for treating neuropathic pain and whether Lilly is making any marketing claims for the drug that aren't bolstered by data.

Several readers have passed along news in the last week of electric shocks being used on youths at a school, the Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts. The kids are some of the toughest behavioral and dysfunction cases going, openly attacking strangers for example. They've flunked out every other conventional unconventional therapy and medications too, so they are now treated with shocks. New York State is trying to break its association with the center, but is meeting resistance from the parents of some of these kids. The New York Times has a good article on this.

What bugs me is that these kids have no rights in the process, as the shocks are approved of by their parents and a court, and that just doesn't sit square with me since our society long ago shunned such treatments as barbaric and does not use them on terrorists for example (at least as far as I know). So why wouldn't these kids get similar consideration?

Thanks to all of you who passed along articles on this center. I appreciate the nudge to write about it.

In other news, it would be impossible for me to close out the year without noting that the great, great jazz pianist Oscar Peterson's death was recently announced. He was 82 and in failing health. The guy was a monster player, combining classic impulses with jazz improvisation in ways that usually left me gasping for breath.

I ran into this recording of him on YouTube in which he is just stunning and his bassist is as good. Enjoy.