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Published online 22 October 2008 | Nature 455, 1017 (2008) | doi:10.1038/4551017a
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Pharma payment probe widens its net
Psychiatrists accused of flouting financial-disclosure rules.
US senator Charles Grassley (Republican, Iowa) is no Sigmund Freud, but since early this year he has succeeded in putting the psychiatric establishment on the couch. Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate finance committee, has detailed how eight prominent academic researchers (see 'Show me the money') failed to obey rules and report to their universities payments from drug companies, some running into seven figures.
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Wow, you would think that psychiatrists of all people would be able to come up with a more sophisticated response than crying discrimination, "other specialties do it too!"
Poor psychiatrists ! Must be suffering from low self-esteem making 'only' $199,000 a year. The comment from Dr. Stotland that Senator Grassley is singling out psychiatry for punishment is beyond childish and absurd and only corroborates those who believe (falsely, in my opinion) that psychiatrists are bogus and more interested in ego and money. Senator Grassley has spent twenty years in the Senate defending the American taxpayers and probing the ethical practices of NIH, chemical companies, industrial polluters, biotech firms, power plants, FDA, and other government and private concerns. Senator Grassley is one of the few Senators standing up to ethical breaches in government and in private industry, and is hardly on a ego trip to seek revenge against psychiatry. The ideological statement by Dr. Stotland says more about her insecure ideological beliefs than it does Senator Grassley's important contributions toward consumer protection.