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Samizdat Health Writer’s Co-operative Inc.

A writers collective

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Books

It’s Always Been One Story

December 26, 2020 by Samizdat Health 1 Comment

Prozac, arguably the most famous drug of our lifetimes, was never approved for sale.

by Paul John Scott

Rather, Prozac when combined with anti-anxiety medication was approved for sale. In an unpromising design that seems so very much at home with the rest of the strange deeds set forth in this clarifying, well-curated new book, for a third-to-half of the patients studied, the antidepressant fluoxetine was studied as part of a cocktail, even though the approval went to Prozac alone.

This was because, when taken by itself, Prozac made people too agitated.

Filed Under: Books, Prescription for Sorrow, Reviews

A Bad Penny

December 16, 2020 by Samizdat Health 1 Comment

Like a bad penny, this one just keeps coming back.

By Patrick D Hahn

As youth prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed, so have youth suicides. A recent diatribe in MedPage Today by Stephen Soumeri and Ross Koppel is the latest attempt in an ongoing campaign to blame soaring rates on youth suicides not on the drugs but on the FDA black box warning linking these drugs to youth suicide –  an idea was first put forth by statistician Robert Gibbons in 2007. It was easily refuted by data then, and it is just as easily refuted now.

Filed Under: Books, Prescription for Sorrow

Prescription for Sorrow

December 1, 2020 by Samizdat Health 1 Comment

One could scarcely have been alive and conscious anywhere in the Western world any time in the past twenty-five years and not have been aware of a raging controversy surrounding antidepressants, suicide, and violence—a controversy that shows no sign of abating. During that same period, prescriptions for antidepressants have skyrocketed. So what is the story?

“Prescription for Sorrow: Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence” by Patrick D. Hahn

Filed Under: Books, Prescription for Sorrow

Antidepressants, Suicide and Violence

December 1, 2020 by Samizdat Health Leave a Comment

On 14 September 1989, Joseph Wesbecker, a forty-seven-year-old former pressman at Standard Gravure of Louisville, Kentucky, entered his erstwhile place of employment armed with a Polytech AK47S semi-automatic rifle, a Sig Sauer P226 9mm pistol, two MAC 11 9mm machine pistols, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, a bayonet, and over a thousand rounds of ammunition. Wesbecker opened fire, killing eight employees and wounding twelve more. He also shot up the water sprinklers, and a police officer responding to the scene would later recall the place ran with what looked like rivers of blood.

From the Preface of Prescription for Sorrow by Patrick D. Hahn

Filed Under: Books, Prescription for Sorrow

Malcharist: Fact or Fiction? Big Pharma, Psychiatry and Ghostwriters

September 16, 2020 by Billiam James Leave a Comment

Malcharist, by Paul John Scott, is a fictional account of one of psychiatry’s most influential key opinion leaders (KOLs), his ghostwriter, and a journalist on the trail of a big scandal in the world of Big Pharma. The story didn’t happen in reality, but Scott has done his homework in such a way that one of medicine’s darkest secrets is exposed in all of its sordid detail.

For those of us familiar with industry-sponsored clinical trials such as GlaxoSmithKline’s studies 329 and 352, it doesn’t take much imagination to draw analogies to an all-too-common theme: a psychiatrist and a ghostwriter who helped create an illusion. He takes all the credit for her labors and she disappears into the background. What is presented to the medical community, however, is a story of pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science.

Filed Under: Books, Malcharist, Reviews

Malcharist Reviews: A truly spellbinding thriller

August 29, 2020 by Samizdat Health Leave a Comment

Malcharist Reviews on Amazon. “Don’t Miss This Brilliant and Breathtaking First Novel by The Gifted Paul John Scott,”Dr. T. “The Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction,” Kevin Miller. “Fascinating and fun. Worth the time and money,” Jeff

Filed Under: Books, Malcharist, Reviews

The lessons of Study 329: How fraud in psychiatric drug research got normalised

August 29, 2020 by Samizdat Health 1 Comment

Study 329, which was a trial of paroxetine for depression in adolescents, is often held up as the poster child for fraud in clinical trials of psychiatric drugs. In Children of the cure: Missing data, lost lives and antidepressants, David Healy, Joanna Le Noury and Julie Wood painstakingly detail the entire sordid affair, including efforts to get the study retracted and to reanalyse the patient-level data. However, they do so with a larger purpose in mind. Study 329 is not presented as an aberration, but rather as emblematic of a systemic failure in modern medicine (or at least in psychiatry), which leads to prescribing practices that do great harm.

Filed Under: Books, Children of the Cure, Study329

A rollicking good read that gives Pharma a run for its money

August 22, 2020 by Samizdat Health Leave a Comment

Malcharist Review by Annie Bevan Malcharist bounds like a hound as Lee Majors spies with his own eyes, his master is unaware he is up-the-creek, without a paddle. Griffin Wagner is fighting the devil’s work and suddenly his botched-up visions give him a break into a new world where right is wrong and wrong is […]

Filed Under: Books, Malcharist, Reviews

This Novel Will Swallow You Whole

August 9, 2020 by Samizdat Health 2 Comments

This is a novel that takes the reader deep inside the Pharmaceutical Empire which invents diseases, creates “patient advocacy organizations” to sell these diseases to the public, manufactures and controls the evidence base purporting to show their nostrums are safe and effective remedies for these diseases, relentlessly gaslights those unfortunate victims harmed by their patent medicines, and smears all who question any of this as “Luddites, anti-vaxxers, tin-foil hatters, and Scientologists.”

Filed Under: Books, Malcharist, Reviews

The Hemingway Effect – Malcharist

August 1, 2020 by Samizdat Health Leave a Comment

This week, Samizdat announces our long-awaited release of Malcharist, an accessible and unusually realistic contemporary fiction work by Paul John Scott. The book is a page-turner about the corruption of clinical trials told through a medical ghostwriter’s crisis of conscience. Set in Manhattan in 2010 and laced with dark humor throughout its fast 352 pages, it […]

Filed Under: Books, Malcharist, Reviews

Malcharist

August 1, 2020 by Samizdat Health 1 Comment

A novel by Paul John Scott

A closely-observed, panoramic thriller about medical science gone wrong, and the people who make dangerous pills seem safe.

It’s Manhattan in the winter of 2010, and Shivani Patel is carrying the secrets of a trade that no one understands: medical ghostwriting. A Cambridge-trained scientist and wordsmith for the world’s largest drugmaker, she makes her soaring pay by delivering the sleight-of-hand needed to move new drugs into journals and onto market. Then she watches as a parade of aging males take credit for her work…

Filed Under: Books, Malcharist

A Cure for Fraudulent Reporting

July 22, 2020 by Samizdat Health Leave a Comment

Children of the Cure is first a deep dive into the fraudulent reporting of “Study 329,” the clinical trial of Paxil (paroxetine) that launched an epidemic of drug-induced suicides by children and adolescents in the United States and many other countries.  It is an indictment of Paxil’s manufacturer, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) and the many doctors who were paid to have their names appear on a study that was ghost-written by GSK.  A review by Jim Gottstein, author of The Zyprexa Papers

Filed Under: Books, Children of the Cure, Reviews, Study329

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