Samizdat Health Writers

A writers collective

Reviews

Drugmakers Have Dropped All Pretense of Being on Our Side

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By Patrick D Hahn

Hot on the heels of the publication of David Healy’s Shipwreck of the Singular comes a paper in Neuropsychopharmacology by Elan Cohen and seven of his colleagues which demonstrates why Shipwreck was needed in the first place.

Seven of the eight authors of the paper are drug company employees. The subject of the paper is the “mitigation” of the placebo response in placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials.

As Dr. Healy points out in Shipwreck, the placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial once was held up as a shield to protect us from useless or dangerous medicines but in fact has turned into a vehicle to deliver adverse consequences with impunity…

A Story of Iatrogenic Insanity: “Prescription for Sorrow”

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There are quite a few books published about the lack of benefit and harm caused by so-called “anti-depressants.”  The fact that so many people have felt compelled to write such books is interesting in itself.  Prescription for Sorrow, by Patrick Hahn, is simply the best one I have read.  It is the most engaging and readable.  This is aided by victim vignettes of real people killed by these drugs to make the data real. 

A book review of “Prescription for Sorrow” by Jim Gottstein

Health Services, Bullshit Jobs, and the Defining Struggle of the Twenty-First Century

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Beginning in 2014, life expectancy in the United States dropped every year for five years straight. This was before the time of Covid, by the way. This is an absolutely unprecedented development which has been completely ignored by the mainstream media.  What is behind this staggering drop in life expectancy? David Healy, a professor of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Ontario, points the finger at a health care system…

A book review of Shipwreck of the Singular by Patrick D Hahn

It’s Always Been One Story

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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.

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

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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.

CounterPunch on The Zyprexa Papers

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CounterPunch.org has just published a great review of The Zyprexa Papers, Jim Gottstein’s book about his battle over Zyprexa (Olanzapine) with drug marketing giant Eli Lilly. Written by Bruce E. Levine, a psychologist and social critic, the review addresses the broad social issues raised by Jim Gottstein’s story. “The Zyprexa Papers is not simply about the harm done by blockbuster psychiatric drugs and drug company illegal marketing. It is also about the perversion of the U.S. legal system, as Gottstein illuminates the courts’ use of secrecy orders in settlement agreements to the detriment of the public.”

A Ghost Story: Children of the Cure

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I suspect the title of this book by David Healy, Joanna Le Noury, and Julie Wood, was inspired by the Stephen King horror story Children of the Corn.  In the Stephen King story, it is the children who are evil.  In Dr. Healy’s book, it is the adults who are perpetrating evil by exaggerating benefits and minimizing harm of antidepressant use in children. A Review of Children of the Cure by David Antonuccio, Ph.D.

This Novel Will Swallow You Whole

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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.”

The Hemingway Effect – Malcharist

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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 […]

A Cure for Fraudulent Reporting

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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