July 18, 2008

In yesterday's WSJ, Mark Herrmann of Drug & Device Law Blog fame reviews what he depicts as a lamentably one-sided treatment of the controversy over alleged side effects of Prozac and other antidepressants:

"Side Effects" [by Alison Bass] belongs to a genre of investigative journalism that involves talking to plaintiffs, their lawyers and their expert witnesses, taking their stories as gospel and denigrating the opposing view because corporate money (apparently less pure than money from the plaintiffs' side) supposedly has a corrupting effect. Ms. Bass admires David Healy, for example, a British psychiatrist and expert witness whom the drug companies have been "unable to discredit." Surely a more even-handed account -- since corporate fees are routinely cited -- would mention the fees that Dr. Healy has collected for testifying for a dozen or more plaintiffs. She does not mention either that a court in 2002 rejected his testimony because of "glaring, overwhelming and unexplained" errors in his analysis.