flickr photo / Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
The latest stunner from Sen. Charles Grassley’s investigation into drug company payments to doctors and researchers involves one of the country’s leading psychiatrists, Emory University’s Charles B. Nemeroff. The NYT’s Gardiner Harris reports that Nemeroff failed to report at least $1.2 million in income he received from consulting contracts with drug makers between 2000 and 2007.
In doing so, Nemeroff violated Emory’s rules, as well as federal research guidelines, Gardiner writes. After the NYT story broke, Nemeroff “voluntarily” stepped down as chairman of Emory’s psychiatry department, at least temporarily. Gardiner writes:
In one telling example, Dr. Nemeroff signed a letter dated July 15, 2004, promising Emory administrators that he would earn less than $10,000 a year from GlaxoSmithKline to comply with federal rules. But on that day, he was at the Four Seasons Resort in Jackson Hole, Wyo., earning $3,000 of what would become $170,000 in income that year from that company — 17 times the figure he had agreed on.
Here’s what some other bloggers are writing:
Howard Brody, (author of “Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry”) @ Ethics, Medicine and Pharma:
I have never met this person and for all I know he is a delightful human being. I bear him no personal ill will. The problem was that wherever I turned in my research on HOOKED, and the topic of conflicts of interest among academic physicians came up, Dr. Nemeroff seemed to be off the charts. He seemed to be the poster child for all that is wrong with the current cozy arrangements between Pharma and acadmic medicine.
Ed Silverman @ Pharmalot:
If you look at this schedule, which runs from 2000 to 2006, the nationally known psychiatrist, who until Friday night chaired the Emory School of Medicine psychiatry department, was a fixture on the Glaxo speaking circuit for such drugs as Paxil and Wellbutrin.
There he is at the Bacara Resort & Spa in Santa Barbara, California, talking up Paxil CR. Here him chat at the Peninsula Grill in Charleston, South Carolina, the Monterey Fish Grotto in Pittsburgh or Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Birmingham, Alabama. No destination was too far from Atlanta…because Glaxo was paying.
CL Psych @ Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look:
The psychiatry world is belatedly exhibiting outrage toward a man whose ability to lure pharma cash seems to know no bounds. He may be the textbook case of a key opinion leader. Of course, I speak of Charles “Bling Bling” Nemeroff.
Daniel Carlat @ Carlat Psychiatry Blog:
If your head is beginning to spin, it is understandable. Nemeroff’s financial entanglements were (and are) extensive, complex, and of a scale possibly unprecedented in psychiatry.
Scott
Please keep me updated on your daily emails about Pharma corruption and related subjects – I am interested in natural alternatives and like to know what is happening in the industry so that I can help to evolve the discussion toward life-supporting rather than life -damaging activities.
October 8, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Doug Bremner MD
Mind you, I am not here to justify Dr. Nemeroff’s bad behavior. To not disclose the payment of more than $10,000 a year from a drug company that makes a drug you are also studying with an NIH funded grant is clearly a violation of NIH policy (although not a violation of the law).
However, when I was attacked by a drug company, Nemeroff was the ONLY person at Emory to come to my defense
http://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/blog.thml
I think you need to take personal character into account before you rush to judgment. He had NO personal incentive to defend me. He did it out of principle.
And in fact he and EVERYONE at Emory was nervous by my behavior. In fact Emory refused to issue a press release about my book.
I have some questions for the Senator.
First off, why are you only investigating psychiatrists? [Answer: psychiatrists have an approval rating in medicine that is only above chiropractors. Many people blame paxil for their problems. It is low hanging fruit]
Second, why don’t you look at other specialties? Take a look at cafepharma.com, where the drug reps are gossiping in relation to the Nemeroff dispute that “key opinion leaders” for advair are at the front of the gravy train. [Answer: cardiologists make life saving drugs, while psychiatrists are pseudoscientists who are trying to invent a myth about serotonin imbalance so they can help sell drugs for their cronies, the drug companies.] [Answer to answer: Not true. You have to treat 100 heart disease patients with Lipitor to prevent one heart attack, while you treat only 8-17 depressed patients with an antidepressant to prevent a recurrence. And if you don't believe that depression is as bad as a heart attack, ask someone who has been there.]
Ask anyone who works in a university hospital. If their docs have any talent, they are never there. It is because they are always away giving talks for pharma. And pretty much all of it is undisclosed. The ones who are complaining about it are the losers who pharma doesn’t want to lecture for them anyway.
Senator Grassley, if you really want to get to the bottom of the corruption that has permeated academic medicine, do a nation wide audit. Of ALL specialties. If you don’t, you are a hypocrite.
http://www.beforeyoutakethatpill.com/blog.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bremner/deposition-x-or-pages-fro_b_100931.html
Doug Bremner MD
http://www.dougbremner.com
October 8, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Joe Newman
Thanks for your comment, Dr. Bremner. Sorry it took so long to get up, it got caught in our spam filter.
October 8, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Nemeroff is a symptom of a bigger problem « citizenvox.org
[...] a PC research associate, opined in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about noted Emory psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff, he of the $2.8 million in Pharma consulting contracts. It might be tempting to write off Nemeroff [...]
October 13, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Geneve from ATL
I wonder if Grassley and NIH should not start investigating other misuses of public grants, such as investigators starting their own unsuccessful companies around valuable patents developed with federal funds, and paying nothing to the public coffers… universities sweet-dealing with their own employees. some technologies could even be life-saving ones… all lost in ego-boosting, failure-destined, enterprises
October 21, 2008 at 3:44 pm