Oh Dear Me
When is writing a memo fun? When the sender is you, the recipient is you, and its purpose is to authorize payment - to you. We’re pretty sure Dr. Charles Nemeroff enjoyed getting that memo (from himself) authorizing $3000 to be paid (to himself) for writing a medical journal supplement, as much as we would enjoy a similar return-address windfall.
But what about that journal supplement itself? These ‘special sections’ in medical journals – often sponsored and usually focused around a related topic, like a disease group or drug class – tend to be less editorially rigorous, amounting to nothing more than glossy chances for companies to buy extra ad space. In this Journal of the American Medical Association study, blinded reviewers found that the quality of the medical articles – in study design, sample size, and analysis — was inferior in the supplements to those published in the parent journals. And other scholars and clinicians have wondered openly whether they are worth the paper they’re printed on – much less $3000.
Yet, that self-payment was just one of the more trifling findings of the Senate Finance Committee into the large undeclared industry payments to Dr. Charles Nemeroff, former head (and by former, we mean Friday) of the Emory University Department of Psychiatry and principal investigator on an NIH grant to study a GlaxoSmithKline drug there. And by industry payments, we mean GlaxoSmithKline.
While the Committee has been hot on the trail of 30 academic psychiatrists and their disclosure sheets that don’t match up to company records, the case around Dr. Nemeroff – depicted in this letter from Committee Chair Sen. Charles Grassley to Emory and obtained by Pharmalot — is singular in the repeating and bald-faced quality to Nemeroff’s bucking of the NIH rules, which require universities to ‘manage’ conflicts caused by investigators’ significant conflicts of interest (defined as $10,000 per year).
For instance, in August 2004, Nemeroff wrote to Emory’s conflict-of-interest committee to say he was in compliance with the $10,000 limit — and in that month alone Nemeroff took in excess of that yearly maximum in speaking gigs and “non-product” phone calls alone.
After Emory’s COI committee raised questions about his failure to follow approval protocol of his consulting agreements and discrepancies on his disclosure sheets, Nemeroff wrote another memo, this one not as fun, about his future compliance, which read: “I will follow the management plans for my conflicts of interest”… and “I shall limit my consulting to GSK to under $10,000/year and I have informed GSK of this policy.”
Grassley’s letter goes on:
Barely a week after this promise, on July 12, 2004, GSK paid Dr. Nemeroff $3,500 in fees and $505.40 in expenses for a talk he gave regarding Paxil at the Larkspur Restaurant and Grill in Las Vegas, Nevada. The following day, Dr. Nemeroff gave two more talks in exchange for $7,000 from GSK ($3,500 per talk).
Maybe the maxim, What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, just hasn’t made it to the Beltway yet.
October 7th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Good piece as always! Nemeroff really raked it in. If he lied about the money, what else has he been lying about. Study results maybe?
October 8th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I am a professor of psychiatry at Emory. Yes, Charlie Nemeroff can be intense; but I have seen worse. Most of the bloggers writing about him have never read his papers or have any real idea of what he has done. Admit it guys…
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, if the children want to throw rocks, they should be informed about the subject.
I had a drug company try to ruin my career.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/doug-bremner/deposition-x-or-pages-fro_b_100931.html
They came pretty darn close. The ONLY person at Emory University to stick up for me was Charlie Nemeroff. And this was for a cause that went fundamentally against what he was into. I.e. my position was ‘anti pharma’ and he wasn’t. But he stuck up for me, to protect academic freedoms, as far as I can tell. Or because he was loyal to his faculty.
What’s the diff?
I have some questions for Senator Grassley.
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. Not to try and justify it, but lets get real.
Finally, I came under full frontal attack for my opinions about accutane and depression that went against pharma and for which they tried to ruin my career, and the ONLY person at Emory to stick up for me was Nemeroff. You can read about it on my web site.
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