After the last post, I thought, "perhaps I was too broad.  Maybe too political, maybe I didn't have enough concrete examples."

Then I opened my mail.

A doctor gets sued for an adverse Zyprexa outcome.

What does the government want to be true?

It's easy to get confused by big numbers and health care reform by subterfuge.

Listen carefully, medicos.  It's the sound of your approaching irrelevance.

Their main crime was that they got paid for it.

You decide.  Make sure that once you pick, you accept the logical consequences of your choice.

A handy rule of thumb, good for reading published clinical trials and court cases is this: if you can't understand the basics in fifteen seconds, you are being lied to.

Making the internet rounds is a post written by Debbie Nathan, (Pornography: A Groundwork Guide and Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt) on what the government is going to do when computer generated child porn becomes indistinguishable from actual photos. 

Other than freak out.

The $253M Vioxx verdict against Merck is overturned.

(It was actually only a reduced $26M verdict, but since the media didn't highlight that fact when Merck lost, I'm following in kind.)

Meanwhile, A New Jersey court removed a $9M punitive damages award in another case, and upheld another Merck verdict in another case.

The court found no evidence that Vioxx caused a fatal cardiac embolus, because-- surprise-- there isn't any evidence.  At best we have an association, not causation, and it may be that the Vioxx itself has nothing at all to do with death.  (Though I realize that the law accepts association as evidence.)

The score is now Merck 11, plaintiff's attorneys 3.

Question: well, what are they supposed to do when there's some evidence that a drug poses a health risk?  Ignore it?

Answer:  who is they?  There isn't supposed to be a they at all.  (There it is again, the steady creep of social democracy, sister of narcissism.)  There's a chemical, it exists, doctors are supposed to know when to use it appropriately.  Not to mention it may later be discovered to have additional value (aspirin, thorazine, thalidomide, etc.) 

When you create a body to decide for doctors whether a drug is worth the risk, then you are saying you do not trust doctors to make this assessment.  Therefore, you do not need doctors at all, you need flowcharts.

Unfortunately, I'll admit, they might be right.

A post sure to offend everyone, conservatives and liberals, parents and pedophiles.

Or so they find in a preliminary review.

You probably think this is an example of the new FDA, the new anti-Pharma FDA, more attentive to public health, getting their act and their data together for the benefit of Americans.

Ha.  Wrong.

It's hard to see the truth when the truth is uninteresting, long, or contained in PDF.  What's left is the interesting untruth, which then becomes truth.

And then we all have a big problem.

Answer the following questions, and don't look at the next until you answer the previous:

1. Does depression in kids raise their risk of violence? 
2. If a kid is violent, is it more or less likely they are depressed?
3. If someone is depressed and violent, is it likely they are a kid?
4. Can you define any of the nouns in the preceding questions?

Phillip Resnick, MD is one of five psychiatry expert witnesses in the country. There are actually many more than five, but only about five get used, repeatedly, for big cases.  They are very busy, and always on the go. (I was on a case  "against" Resnick, and I didn't even see him.) 

They are also the main educators in the field.  Which is unfortunate.  Not because they're bad, but because they are part of that system they are teaching.  All they can tell you is what it's like inside the building.  Not whether the building is, in fact, a boat, or a duck, or dream.