Industry

-The pharmaceutical industry spent $4.53 billion on direct-to-consumer advertising in the US in 2014, up 18% from $3.83 billion in 2013.

-The US government has been "chipping away" at the FDA's powers in order to speed up drug approvals.

For decades the gold standard for medical evidence was the review article - an essay looking at most or (hopefully) all of the research on a particular question and trying to divine a general trend in the data toward some conclusion ("therapy X seems to be good for condition Y," for example). More recently, the format of review articles has shifted - at least where the questions addressed have leant themselves to the new style. The idea has been to look at the original data for all of the studies available, and in effect reanalyze them as though the research participants were all taking part in one gigantic study. By increasing the number of data points and averaging across the vagaries of different studies, a clearer finding might emerge. The meta-analysis has gone on to be revered as a strategy for advancing healthcare. It has vulnerabilities.

-Experts comment on AstraZeneca's latest way of attempting to comply with pressures to provide open data.

-Public Citizen analyzed public comments on proposed government rule changes for drug company sales representatives.

Scholars from the Centre for Global Health Policy describe changes in drug policies being taken by many national governments that are motivated by national security concerns.

The more a country's system of medical care expands, the sicker people feel -- and much of that effect seems related to psychiatry.

After a second critical report this month about its psychiatry department's ethical practices and conflicts of interest, the University of Minnesota has temporarily suspended enrollment in its psychiatric drug trials.

Recently the problem of publication bias has been shaking the foundations of much of psychology and medicine. In the field of pharmacology, the problem is worse, because the majority of outcome trials (on which medication approval and physician information is based) are conducted by pharmaceutical firms that stand to benefit enormously from positive results, and run the risk of enormous financial loss from negative ones. Numerous studies have found that positive results tend to be published, while negative ones are quietly tucked under the rug.

The majority of clinical trials are still not reporting their results to the US government's ClinicalTrials.gov.

The latest investigative report into the University of Minnesota's psychiatric research practices was "scathing," reported Forbes in a two-part story.

-On a list of prescription drugs that generated the most in global sales dollars in 2014, the antipsychotic Abilify was number twelve at $5.7 billion.

Data on OpenSecrets.gov show Murphy is being heavily funded by the same interests that stand to benefit financially from his Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act -- pharmaceutical companies and psychiatric hospitals.

-Forbes reports on the "boom" in psychiatric drug research that is going on, after a short period where onlookers were claiming that pharmaceutical companies were leaving the business.

-MIA News Editor Rob Wipond examines the questionable sources of statistics like "1 in 5 Americans are mentally ill" and "90% of people who commit suicide have a mental illness."

-Health policy analyst Joel Lexchin discusses how and why deadly drugs get onto the market and often take years to be identified and withdrawn.

-ProPublica found a situation where drug companies have a remarkable tendency to frequently misspell their own names and the names of their drugs.

-Are publicly funded research centers the answer to curbing corruption and bias in medical and psychiatric studies?

The Fix reviews the past and present of the estimated $2 billion/year industry of trying to "improve" the behaviors and attitudes of "troubled teens." Adolescence...

Bloomberg Businessweek investigates the companies involved in buying and selling mass databases of people's prescription-drug histories, and the new ways in which that information is being used by skirting privacy protections.

It is "unethical" for the British government to establish expected rates of depression and to pay doctors per diagnosis to increase the diagnosing of...

The January 2015 issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica has a section of freely available articles discussing the public image of psychiatry from a variety...

In Bad Science and in the British Medical Journal, Ben Goldacre discusses a recent BMJ study that found a strong tendency for abstracts and...

Many insurance companies have little interest in slowing the rise of inappropriate over-prescribing of pharmaceutical drugs, according to a study in Health Policy. That's...

ProPublica revisits the story of Dr. Chuck Denham, the previous editor of the Journal of Patient Safety and former "co-chairman of a committee that...