Industry payments to Biederman and his colleagues made headlines in 2008 when Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) accused them of understating, or failing to report at all, millions of dollars in support. Grassley detailed many discrepancies between what various drug companies said they paid the doctors and what the doctors reported to Harvard and the MGH.
The accusation carried more weight because Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.
Biederman and the other two psychiatrists have also published extensively on the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The three will also undergo training on conflict-of-interest and will suffer "a delay of consideration for promotion or advancement." Biederman is already a full professor; the other two are associate professors.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2427133/
psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman, and two of his colleagues, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens, had altogether received more than $4.2m (£2.1m; €2.7m) from drug companies since 2000.
Professor Biederman, at the centre of the scandal, has been widely recognised as one of the most influential psychiatrists in the world. He is a leading proponent of the diagnosis of paediatric bipolar disorder and he is currently conducting a study of the antipsychotic, quetiapine (Seroquel) in children aged 4 to 6 years with bipolar disorder
The Connection Between Big Pharma And Our Kids
MW: How do pharmaceutical companies influence the creation of childhood psychiatric diagnoses?
Child psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman, for example, was highly influential among child psychiatrists and pediatricians -- "if he breathed a drug at a conference, thousands of kids would be on it," according to physician Dr. Lawrence Diller.JB: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders (DSM)" is the bible of psychiatric disorders. Indeed, the lead authors of the last two editions have joined forces to publicly warn that the broadening of diagnostic categories ill-serves patients and is a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. For pharmaceutical companies, more and wider diagnoses of mental disorders mean larger markets for their products. That cannot be denied. Nor can it be denied that the companies influence not only the "DSM" process, but other less formal channels through which diagnoses are formed, such as medical research, the medical literature, and continuing education for doctors.
The same was true for diagnoses, in particular the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder the he almost single-handedly created.
As Marcia Angell, Harvard professor and former editor-in-chief of "The New England Journal of Medicine," described it in a clinical trial "you can control what data you look at, control the analysis, and then shade your interpretation of the results. You can design studies to come out the way you want them to." This can help yield "science" that emphasizes the efficacy of drugs and downplays the drugs' negative side-effects. But if a study does come out negative, a company can simply refrain from publishing it and it never reaches the public.
JB: As I understand it, Dr. Biederman began to notice in the 1990s that some kids who had been diagnosed with ADHD were not responding to treatment with stimulants, the usual approach to treating that disorder. He attributed this to the fact they actually had bipolar disorder. This was a radical idea at the time. Bipolar disorder was believed to be a disorder that only afflicted adults, and perhaps teens in rare cases.MW: In your chapter "Prescriptions for Profit," you discuss how profitable diagnoses are invented by psychiatrists. What was the role of Harvard Medical School professor Joseph Biederman in creating the diagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder?
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