First Career:
I went to medical school as a mathematician planning a research career. I did an Internal Medicine Residency and a NIH Immunologu Fellowship. My planned post-doc was interrupted by a three year required stint in the Air Force. To my great surprise, I loved being a practicing doctor. It wasn’t the diseases. It was the tangles that the patients struggled with that I found so compelling.
Second Career:
I changed gears and returned to a psychiatry residency at Emory University, and started psychoanalytic training. After training, I became the Residency Training Director. In the mid-1980s, a new chairman arrived and there was a major changeover to a biomedical department.
This time, I didn’t change gears, but psychiatry did. I resigned my tenured position and went into practice as a psychodynamic psychotherapist. I continued to teach in the psychoanalytic program and the college, but had little connection with the psychiatry department. In 2003, I retired, leaving Atlanta for the Georgia mountains, the end of a rewarding career.
Third Career:
After 5 years, I began to work some as a volunteer in a local charity clinic, and was absolutely horrified at the peculiar polypharmacy the patients were being given. About that time, Senator Grassley began to investigate a number of prominent psychiatrists for unreported industry income and other conflicts of interest – one being the chairman of the department I was affiliated with, Dr. Charles Nemeroff.
I began to read up on the psychopharmacology literature and couldn’t believe what I found. I had been oblivious to the gross invasion of academic psychiatry by the pharmaceutical industry, cloistered in my psychotherapy practice. I had already been a blogger, but the more I learned, the more the blog [1boringoldman.com] turned towards the dreadful state of affairs in psychiatry.
I started meeting others who were as alarmed as I was becoming. I polished up my old statistical skills from years before and I began to vet clinical trials and to read and write about all of the deceitful science. Along the way, I began to correspond with Allen Jones, the TMAP whistle-blower [Texas Medical Algorithm Program], and ultimately my wife and I spent a week in Austin Texas attending that trial. Sitting in the courtroom listening to the testimony, I realized how incredibly corrupt the whole scene had become. It made it all very real for me and I haven’t looked back since.
Along the way, I had looked into Paxil Study 329, but in August 2012, I happened onto the raw data that had finally been posted on the Internet, and I took a stab at analyzing it on the blog. I submitted my findings to the JAACAP [Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, publisher of the study] requesting a retraction [to no avail].
When a RIAT team [Restoring Abandoned and Invisible Trials] was being formed to reanalyze and republish that study, I jumped at the chance to be on the team.
contact details etc
web site: 1boringoldman
