Insight Center » Have you Heard?

Merc Wrote Drug Studies for Doctors

Diane Kern — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:30:56 +0000

Although I am not publishing the numerous alarming reports of, yet another, drug study not well done on this site, this particular article is of overiding interest.

“The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.
The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look at the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.”

”The lead author of Wednesday’s article, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said a close look at the Merck documents raised broad questions about the validity of much of the drug industry’s published research, because the ghostwriting practice appears to be widespread. It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Dr. Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association.”
See New York Times article.

“Adverse Childhood Experience” and Illness

Diane Kern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:22:18 +0000

Ongoing studies link ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ to all manner of medical problems. We are all intuitively aware that childhood trauma has potentially disastrous consequences. Gathering and analyzing information that contributes to our understanding of specifically biological consequences is difficult. A significant collaborative effort coordinated by researchers at Kaiser Foundation Hospital and the Center for Disease Control is now bearing fruit. You might want to subscribe to the elist for reports of ongoing results or just visit the web site from time to time.
On reviewing this data it is important to understand that we are just beginning to glimpse these processes in a scientific manner. Most science brought to bear in these studies is ‘materialist’ physically-based science. Also at work as these processes unfold are ongoing quantum processes. We cannot yet specify how quantum processes affect these processes but best science suggests that mental processing may mediate the experience giving rise to predispositions to illness or health (see Chopra)
See http://www.acestudy.org/aboutus.html

“The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations”

Diane Kern — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:53:20 +0000

Deena Skolnick Weisberg and others write in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience:

“Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation” (emphasis added).

“They tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanations, according to a 2×2 design (good explanation vs. bad explanation and without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience). Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations” (emphasis added). See:
http://jocn.mitpress.org/content/vol20/issue3/#ARTICLES.