How Sad: Harvard Researchers Aren’t All Honest, After All!

Sunday, June 7th — Well, I suppose everyone but me already knew this. But I still respect my Alma Mater enough to think that most of the professors and researchers at Harvard can be trusted to keep their hands clean as far as their work is concerned. Okay, okay, so a person of my advanced age ought not to be so naive, I can hear you all saying.

Here’s the thing: Three world-famous and well-respected Harvard child psychiatrists, who have been forerunners in popularizing the use of powerful antipsychotic drugs in children with bipolar disease, have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar, so to speak. They failed to report or disclose large amounts of outside income from pharmaceutical companies and other entities that would constitute a conflict of interest, if their research were to remain objective and free of any hint of influence. These individuals were among the best-known researchers to be working on the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder in young people — and such diagnosis and treatment has soared in the past few years.  Billions of dollars in grants from the National Institutes of Health and other organizations were involved.

You can read the article if this interests you at all. It’s from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/us/08conflict.html?ex=1213502400&en=23737184f344c4ca&ei=5070&emc=eta1. So, does this scandal mean that their grants for future study are down the drain? Probably. Could it mean that a good percentage of the kids who have been on these extremely powerful drugs for years might not have needed them? Maybe. I am really saddened by this, and annoyed at myself for still thinking that just because researchers are supposedly working on behalf of children, they aren’t also taking kickbacks from Pharma.

The Ivory Tower of Academia isn’t, I guess, quite so far away from the nastiness of the everyday down-in-the-dirt world as it was in my day. Or maybe it wasn’t then, either, and I was just too gullible and trusting to know it. (That’s my beloved spouse’s view: “The trouble with you is, you like everybody!“  Oh, wow, that’s really a dreadful fault, I’ll have to work on that!)

I wonder how many of those kids with bipolar disorder might have been helped in some way by chiropractic, instead of by drugs that will knock your socks off and turn you into a sort of robot? Guess we’ll never know.

Thanks for reading — Betsy