U. Miami: Send Us Your Professionally Challenged
When the poster child for everything this blog inveighs against, Dr. Charles Nemeroff, was finally stripped of his chairmanship of psychiatry at Emory after many years of blatant conflicts of interest, I had finally hoped I could continue these discussions without again having to mention his name. But I had reservations. The uncharacteristic meekness with which Dr. Nemeroff appeared to accept his chastisement and demotions somehow seemed to hint that there were more episodes of this soap opera yet to come.We now read that Dr. Nemeroff has been hired by the University of Miami as its new chair of psychiatry:

Family Docs Resign from AAFP over Coke
I am proud of my fellow family physicians who are making their objections loudly known to the American Academy of Family Physicians over the deal with Coke that I addressed a few posts back, according to this new story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091104/ap_on_he_me/us_med_doctors_coke_dealSadly, if the responses to this news report from AAFP leadership are accurate, the AAFP still does not get it. "[AAFP CEO Dr. Douglas] Henley said the academy regrets the resignations and hopes other members will not "rush to judgment" before seeing the new content." News flash: w

NAMI and Pharma: New Revelations
For a good while, Sen. Grassley and his team seemed focused on one specific area of Pharma--outing academic docs who are on the take for big bucks, and who may not have fully disclosed their takings to their institutions or to NIH. Now, it seems, the good Senator is after astroturf. We read that he sent letters last spring to a dozen or so disease and patient advocacy organizations to ask about how much money they received from drug and device makers.One result is reported by Gardiner Harris in the New York Times:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/health/22nami.html?_r=1The National

Why Things Don't Go Better with Commercial Sponsorship--Coke and AAFP
I don't get any joy out of using this blog to tattle on my own professional medical society, the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)-- but they recently cut a "high six figure" deal with Coke:http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2009/10/family_doctors_sign_educationa.htmlThe support is to pay for educational materials on beverages and other nutrition issues. The way the general public is likely to see this deal is well captured by the first paragraph of coverage on NPR's health blog by Maggie Mertens:When health questions crop up, the first resource for ans

The Tangled Web Woven by Industry-Sponsored Research
Our investigative-journalist friends, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee, have capped off a year-long investigation with this article on the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/government-orders-columbi_n_312536.htmlThis case has been getting tossed around since 1999. It defies a quick summation. An anesthesiologist then on the faculty at Columbia University, Elliott Bennett-Guerrero, received funding from Abbott Laboratories to do a study of several blood-expanding intravenous solutions--fluids that were supposed to treat blood loss and shock without the need for