NPR Radio Show Tied To Pharma Influence

Excellent piece on Slate.com today detailing Big Pharma influence on "health and science" programs in the media. It paid particular attention to "The Infinite Mind," a program hosted by Fred Goodwin, who as most of you know is one of the godfathers of bipolar disorder treatment and an extremely influential voice in psychiatry, having authored the standard medical textbook on the issue. "The Infinite Mind" is carried on all manner of public radio stations stations around the US and Canada. It is independently produced.

Slate focuses in particular on three guests Goodwin had on his program in late March, a show entitled "Prozac Nation: Revisited," which laid out the view that the press had wildly overreacted to concerns around anti-depressants and violence as well as suicides and suicidality connected to the drugs. As it turns out, the guests and host all have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.

"Which brings us back to The Infinite Mind and "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a show that may stand in a class by itself for concealing bias. In addition to the show's unrestricted grants from Lilly, the host, Goodwin, is on the board of directors of Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, an industry-funded front, or "Astroturf" group, which receives a majority of its funding from drug companies. CMPI President Peter Pitts was one of Goodwin's three guests for "Prozac Nation." We don't know which companies fund his group because when we asked him, Pitts said, "I don't want to go into that." But CMPI took in more than $1.4 million in 2006 and, according to its tax forms, spent $210,000 to influence the media through a large conference, a blog the group maintains, op-eds published in major newspapers, and multimedia programs and podcasts. Pitts has another title that might have been relevant to The Infinite Mind; he is the senior vice president for global health affairs at the PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee, which represents Eli Lilly Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and more than a dozen other pharmaceutical companies. Yet on the show, Pitts was identified only by his title as "a former FDA official."

"The second guest on "Prozac Nation," Andrew F. Leuchter, is a professor of psychiatry at UCLA who has received research money from drug companies including Eli Lilly Inc., Pfizer, and Novartis. The third guest, Nada Stotland, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, has served on the speakers' bureaus of GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. None of Leuchter and Stotland's ties to industry was revealed to listeners—instead, each was introduced as a prominent academic.

"The Infinite Mind's Web site states, "Our independence is perhaps our greatest asset." Perhaps, indeed. Neither Goodwin nor the show's producers responded to our repeated requests for interviews and queries about their funding. Pitts, who to his credit did give us an interview, said he didn't know why his ties to industry weren't revealed on the show. Curious, we tried to learn more about the funding for The Infinite Mind—and could discover only that the show's award-winning production company, Lichtenstein Creative Media, was dissolved by the state of Massachusetts on March 28 for failing to file a single annual report since its establishment in 2004."

I congratulate the reporters on this piece--Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer--for kicking butt all over the place. They didn't get into Goodwin's industry ties--probably because they speak for themselves--but here's a statement he made on behalf of Eli Lilly when Zyprexa was approved as a maintenance med for bipolar disorder in 2004 (and, you can bet such a statement isn't made for free):

"'It is good news that the FDA has now approved Zyprexa as a new tool for physicians to use to delay relapse and prolong periods of stability and wellness.'"

Here's Goodwin's financial disclosure from a 2004 paper in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (.pdf here) touting Lamictal:

Dr. Goodwin has received research support from Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Solvay, Janssen, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Forest, Sanofi and Bristol-Myers Squibb; has received honoraria and participated in speakers/advisory boards for Solvay, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Janssen, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Bristol-Myers Squibb; and has been a consultant for GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Solvay and Novartis."

If Goodwin is willing to release his financial conflicts to his own academic peers in a juried article, then why isn't he willing to tell the public the same thing when he holds forth on criticizing the media over its coverage of anti-depressants? It is discouraging to me to see someone of Goodwin's stature--I know from a patient of his that he is well-regarded by his clients--is such a shill for Big Pharma on the side and doesn't disclose that on his program. It's even weirder to me that the program didn't disclose Peter Pitts' deep ties to Big Pharma.

I have previously criticized the "Prozac Nation" program for misstating available evidence on the issues and for not making available to the public competing viewpoints. In other words, the show was wildly biased in a way scientists and allegedly "independent" media should avoid and, frankly, had damn near religious overtones in its praise of SSRIs. If that's how Goodwin and his producers want to do things, it's a free country, but they ought to disclose whatever financial conflicts they have. It also galls me that the program, as I noted last month, is so one-sided yet is carried on taxpayer-funded and listener-funded public radio. It's heard by 500,000 people each week and one would expect a certain level of media ethics from such a program, if not some level of oversight by NPR itself. In fact, I think the NPR stations that carry the program ought to reexamine their relationship with the program, especially given that the program's producers won't disclose their funding to even the IRS.

Maybe some readers would be interested in writing the station in their area that carries the program. Let me know.

Here, I'll disclose my financial conflicts for this site: reader-supported and Pharma-free. I thank my readers for my ability to say this each and every day. In addition to reader contributions, I subsidize my work here through outside freelance writing.

Stumble It!