David Healy

David Healy
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The David Healy Affair

Pediatric bipolar disorder: An object of study in the creation of an illness, by David Healy and Joanna Le Noury, International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, 19 (2007) 209–221.
As outlined above, a number of forces appear to have swept aside traditional academic skepticism with the result that an increasing number of children and infants are being put on cocktails of potent drugs without any evidence of benefit.
.........If the process outlined here was one that could reasonably be expected to lead to benefits it could regarded as therapeutic. But given that there is no evidence for benefit and abundant prima facie evidence that giving the drugs in question to vulnerable subjects in such quantities cannot but produce consequent difficulties for many of these minors, one has to wonder whether we are not witnessing instead a variation on Munchausen’s syndrome, where some significant other wants the individual to be ill and these significant others derive some gain from these proxy illnesses.

When the treatment failed to work, they claimed it was the disease, not the treatment that was at fault. Similarly psychiatry blamed the disease rather than the drugs. Just as we have since done with the SSRIs and suicide. [2001] Psychopharmacology & The Government Of The Self by David Healy

It's virtually impossible to sue a pharmaceutical company in Britain, partly because of the difficulty of getting any funding for such actions.
There's no point appealing to the government drugs watchdog—the MHRA. It is a small outfit entirely funded by the drug industry. It has never taken any action against the academics who make fraudulent claims in ghost-written articles, nor doctors working for the companies who repeat such claims, even when they have been shown to be untrue. So the only other body to turn to is the General Medical Council, whose job it is to investigate the conduct of doctors — but it has shown no inclination to act. Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy

Public statements about the safety of the drug were a lie; that the company knew Prozac was responsible for a raised risk of suicide and was only slightly more effective than a placebo. Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy

Drugs such as antibiotics, hypertension drugs and the first treatments for cancer proved their worth in trials. Until the 1980s, these were run in universities. Independent academics did the research and published the results. But for the past 20 years the drug firms themselves have increasingly run trials. The result has been to undermine the value of the whole system. Now company employees analyse the data and medical journalists are hired to write them up for publication. Then Oxbridge and Ivy League professors are paid several thousand pounds to be credited as the authors of these articles.......I have also seen company memos asking who would be the most 'useful' academics to have as the authors of articles already written. Once published in top medical journals, these confections will deliver more sales than any number of drug representatives, but all too often they are not accurate reports of the trial results. In other organisations when evidence of disregard for public safety emerges, heads roll. But there have been no resignations following these drug disasters — barely a flicker of embarrassment. Why you should never trust new wonder drugs by Prof David Healy