Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17470

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Electronic Source

Silverman E
Worst Practice? Senate Probes NPR Host’s Firm
Pharmalot 2008 Nov 21
http://www.pharmalot.com/2008/11/worst-practice-senate-probe-npr-hosts-firm/

Full text:

Two days after lashing into Fred Goodwin, who hosts “The Infinite Mind” on National Public Radio, US Senator Chuck Grassley is now investigating Best Practice, a pharmaceutical consulting firm that Goodwin helped establish in the late ’90’s. Among the many services that have been offered by the firm – marketing consultations to drugmakers and the “dissemination of new off-label information.”
Doctors can prescribe a drug to treat an illness even if the FDA has not approved that use, but promotion of off-label activity is a big no-no. So in a letter sent today to Roger Meyer, who heads the firm (pictured right), Grassley wants to know more about Best Practice’s questionable practices. The Senator notes that the claims can be found on older versions of the firm’s web site (you can look here at an archived version). This is the Best Practice web site today.
How did Grassley find Best Practice? By investigating Goodwin, who we wrote about earlier. Last March, on an episode of his program, “The Infinite Mind,” which is heard on 300 NPR stations, featured three experts who discussed the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide. And all four, including Goodwin, declared that worries about the drugs have been overblown.
As it turns out, Goodwin also had undisclosed ties to drugmakers. Since 2000, for instance, Glaxo paid Goodwin more than $1.2 million in speaking fees and over $100,000 in expenses. And Glaxo markets the Paxil antidepressant, which UK regulators determined that the drugmaker had been aware since 1998 that its pill was associated with a higher risk of suicidal behavior in adolescents. NPR is embarassed and angry by all this and yanked the program from its satellite service (here is the back story, complete with a chart and a link to Grassley’s comments in the Congressional Record).