Hi readers. I'm reposting this--something I've never done before--because this post originally went up during the dead week between Christmas and New Year's and, given its assertions, it's worth posting again since few people saw it last week. Or at...
Posted in Furious Seasons on January 7, 2010 12:03 AM
There's been a lot of coverage of amendments to the recently-passed Senate health care reform bill over the last 10 days, especially the Medicare giveaways for the State of Nebraska reportedly employed to capture the support of Sen. Ben Nelson...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 29, 2009 12:03 AM
File this one under OMG: the Miami Herald today reports that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has sent a stern letter to federal health officials citing the case of a Miami, Fla. psychiatrist who has been writing an average of 153...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 16, 2009 01:38 PM
Earlier this year, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded that the National Alliance on Mental Illness reveal details of its funding by pharma companies. Now, the senator has gone many steps further and has demanded similar disclosures from 32 medical advocacy...
Posted in Furious Seasons on December 9, 2009 12:01 AM
Most of you are aware of a long-running campaign by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) to ferret out undisclosed pharma company funding of academic researchers who also wind up taking federal research money. Well, it ain't the Senator who does all...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 21, 2009 12:03 AM
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has struck again, today sending a letter to 23 medical schools and asking them to reveal policies on conflicts of interest and requirements for disclosure of financial relationships between faculty and Big Pharma. The 23 schools...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 24, 2009 10:38 AM
Most of you are aware that Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter to the National Alliance on Mental Illness last month, asking for the organization, which lobbies Congress, to reveal how much it gets from what pharma companies. NAMI...
Posted in Furious Seasons on May 6, 2009 12:05 AM
I'm sure some of you will get a chuckle out of this: in November, the International Forum on Mood and Anxiety Disorders (website) will hold its annual conference, this year in Monaco, and one of the conference topics will be...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 17, 2009 12:01 AM
A reader sent along an email from NAMI National to its many supporters yesterday and I thought I'd share it with you all. The initial Grassley query of NAMI is here. From: Mike Fitzpatrick Sent: Tue 4/7/2009 3:05 PM To:...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 8, 2009 12:53 PM
As I noted last year, America's uber mental health advocacy group the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) was getting oodles from pharma companies, including $490,000 from Eli Lilly. What NAMI uses that money for isn't clear to me, but...
Posted in Furious Seasons on April 6, 2009 03:02 PM
On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a profile of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), longtime thorn in the side of government waste, the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, and friend to whistleblowers. His thoughts on the FDA's relationship with drug and...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 10, 2009 10:06 AM
In the ongoing saga of members of Congress looking into pharma payouts to various researchers, Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.) have asked J&J to turn over details of its payouts to physicians in regards to its antipsychotic...
Posted in Furious Seasons on November 6, 2008 12:22 PM
A few of you have probably already caught the news elsewhere: yesterday, Charles Nemeroff resigned as chair of the psychiatry department at Emory University. The move came on the heels of revelations that he'd taken in $2.8 million in pharma...
Posted in Furious Seasons on October 4, 2008 01:45 PM
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has nailed yet another university and yet another psych researcher for underreporting of monies received from a pharma company. This time out its the University of Texas and Karen Wagner, a psychiatry professor at UT-Galveston. From...
Posted in Furious Seasons on September 11, 2008 12:01 AM
The New York Times is out today with an article on Sen. Charles Grassley's (R-Iowa) investigation of the deep ties between medicine and Big Pharma and in particular of the field of psychiatry. As the paper's Ben Carey and Gardiner...
Posted in Furious Seasons on July 12, 2008 11:29 AM
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is sure turning into a one-man wrecking crew for many psych researchers and will probably move onto other branches of medicine soon enough. He's already exposed massive conflicts and misreported payouts from pharma companies involving three...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 27, 2008 12:05 AM
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is sure turning into a one-man problem for Big Pharma. Today he's calling on the FDA to take a look-see at Glaxo's data on Paxil safety. "The British counterpart to our country’s FDA found that GlaxoSmithKline...
Posted in Furious Seasons on June 12, 2008 11:18 AM
Many of you know that last week news came out that documents in a California-based lawsuit established that GlaxoSmithKline had been hiding suicidality data connected with the use of Paxil (Seroxat elsewhere) for some 15 years and that a US...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 12, 2008 12:07 AM
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) yesterday sent a letter to GSK asking for copies of documents recently unsealed in a court in California that point to the company knowing of elevated suicide risks around its anti-depressant Paxil as far back as...
Posted in Furious Seasons on February 8, 2008 12:03 AM