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Why the tragic case of Dna Markingson and the culpability of the University of Minnesota won't go away...
The disturbing circumstances surrounding the enrollment
and subsequent suicide of Dan Markingson (2004) after he was given an experimental
antipsychotic drug, Seroquel, as a test subject in AstraZeneca's CAFE trial--having
been enrolled while he was hospitalized under an involuntary commitment order--are
continuing to generate outrage and dismay.
The case against AstraZeneca's corrupt practices is well
documented in courts of law and in civil and criminal settlements with the
Department of Justice:
Kickbacks to physicians, rigged clinical trials in which
company officials "cherry picked" the data to be disclosed while
"burying" unfavorable study findings, the company's use of
"smoke and mirrors" to obscure Seroquel's failed efficacy,
AstraZeneca's failure to warn that Seroquel can cause diabetes and other health
problems, and its illegal off-label marketing of Seroquel. On April 27, 2010, AstraZeneca and the U.S.
Dept. of Justice reached a $520 million settlement.
But what of the case against the University of Minnesota
and the psychiatrists who conducted the trial?
Their actions and the significant
financial stake they had in the trial, have never undergone independent
scrutiny.
Those familiar with the documented facts in the case, are
convinced that the University of Minnesota and the psychiatrists who enrolled
Markingson when he was mentally unstable--and who then refused to withdraw him
despite his mother's frantic pleas--are culpable for the tragic results.
This case encapsulates the corrupt practices that ensue
when academia and the pharmaceutical industry become partners in joint
financial ventures.
Adding insult to fatal injury, the University of
Minnesota treated Dan Markingson's mother, Mary Weiss, with callous
disregard--an attitude comparable to that displayed by the Catholic Church
toward victims of sexually abusive priests.
Over the past several years, articles in the St. Paul
Pioneer Press, Minneapolis Post, City Pages, and Mother Jones magazine have
suggested an alarming string of ethical violations--including gross conflicts
of interest by the psychiatrists and the University; recruitment of mentally incompetent
subjects; and the integrity of the study
itself--which, if true, suggest serious problems in the way that clinical
research is conducted and overseen at the university.
Dr. Charles Schulz, chief of psychiatry, and Stephen
Olson, personally earned a combined $811,045 between 2002 and 2008 from
pharmaceutical companies, including $261,364 from AstraZeneca, the sponsor of
the CAFE Seroquel trial in which Dan Markingson was enrolled.
The Minneapolis Post reported: “The University of
Minnesota benefited financially from the study: More than $300,000 went to the
Department of Psychiatry.”
In a searing article in Mother Jones, Dr. Carl Elliott
reported that the U of Minnesota Department of Psychiatry had earned $15,648
for each person it enrolled in the AstraZeneca Seroquel study. And at the time
that Markingson was enrolled in the study, Dr. Elliott wrote, the University
was having a serious problem recruiting subjects--it risked being dropped by
AstraZeneca as one of the study's trial sites.
In 2000, Charles Schulz, chief of psychiatry at the
University of Minnesota, gave a presentation at the American Psychiatric
Association meeting in which he made misleading claims about the safety and
efficacy of AstraZeneca's antipsychotic, Seroquel, calling the drug
"significantly superior" to Haldol. In an AstraZeneca press release,
he stated,
"I hope that our
findings help physicians better understand the dramatic benefits of newer
medications..."
Dr. Schulz' optimistic, but unsupportable statements belied the
manufacturers' own assessment of the data:
"The data don't look
good," an AstraZeneca official, John Tumas, warned in an e-mail on March
23, 2000. That month, an internal company analysis of the raw data concluded:
"It is clear that a claim of superiority for Seroquel over Haloperidol
(Haldol) could not be generated using these data."
In a 2009 interview with Pioneer Press , Schulz admitted that
his prior statements were "exaggerated" and he acknowledged that his
own study did not really show that Seroquel was more effective than the older
drug. "That's a bit of a misunderstanding."
http://www.examiner.com/mental-health-in-minneapolis/u-of-m-psychiatrist-s-charles-schulz-misleading-claims-about-seroquel
But that message, by the chief of psychiatry at the
University of Minnesota, carried weight with psychiatrists who were persuaded to prescribe Seroquel. AstraZeneca got the service they had paid him for. His (admitedly false claim about the drug's efficacy) served as a useful marketing pitch
to boost the drug's sales, which reached
$4.5 billion annually.
Dr. Jerome Kassirer, the former editor of the New England
Journal of Medicine, was prompted to express his disgust (September 15, 2010):
"The conflict of interest is disgusting, and it
seems quite likely that the boy's death was an indirect consequence of the
financial inducements of the study. At the very least, the university should
have appointed an independent review board, dismissed all the hospital charges,
and paid the boy's mother damages."
In November, 2010, eight University of Minnesota faculty
members of the Department of Bioethics, sent a letter to the university's Board
of Regents requesting the appointment of an outside panel of experts to
investigate gross ethical issues raised by the 2004 suicide of Dan Markingson. (below)
Those ethical
violations include:
"...recruiting a mentally ill, possibly
incompetent subject into a research study while he was under an involuntary
commitment order; large financial conflicts of interest on the part of the
university researchers conducting the study; a payment structure for the study
which included financial incentives to recruit and retain subjects rather than
provide them with standard therapy; an allegedly biased study design aimed at
generating positive results for AstraZeneca rather than investigating a genuine
scientific question; the failure of university researchers to address the
legitimate concerns of Mr. Markingson’s mother, Mary Weiss, who warned that her
son was suicidal and who attempted for months to have him removed from the
study as his mental condition deteriorated; the apparent development of a
specialized unit in Fairview Hospital designed to identify severely mentally
ill subjects for recruitment into research studies; and finally, a failure of
the institutional oversight system for protecting human subjects of research.”
This case sheds light on how the commercialization of
medicine devalues both the integrity of medical research and patients' rights
reducing both to a means in the service of a financial end.
Additional background: University of Minnesota corrupt research legacy
In 1994, ten years before the tragic death of Dan
Markingson, Dr. Bary Garfunkel, the Director of the University of Minnesota,
Department of Child and Adolsescent Psychiatry, was sentenced to prison for
falsifying documents related to clinical trials of Anafranil.
In 1995, Dr. John Najarian was indicted by a federal
grand jury for theft and tax evasion related to the illegal sale of ALG, an
experimental drug whose sales amounted to $80 million most of which went to the
University of Minnesota. This resulted in NIH placing severe restrictions on
the University's freedom to use research funds.
Vera Hassner Sharav
http://www.medcitynews.com/2010/12/university-of-minnesota-profs-demand-investigation-of-drug-trial/
12.6.10 | Thomas
Lee |
Minneapolis, Minnesota
U. of Minnesota
profs demand investigation of drug trial death
Dr.
Carl Elliott, University of Minnesota
A
group of University of Minnesota professors want the board of regents to
investigate the suicide of a patient enrolled in a university-run drug study.
Led
by Dr.
Carl Elliott, the
professors demand the regents appoint an independent outside panel of experts
to examine the death of Dan Markingson, a mentally ill patient who killed
himself after taking an experimental psychiatric drug developed by AstraZeneca.
The professors accuse the school of several
ethics violations, including financial conflict of interest and enrolling Markingson even though
he may have been too sick to consent.
“Patients
participating in research studies at the University of Minnesota need to be
confident that the university is doing everything it can to protect them from
harm,” stated a Nov. 29 letter to the regents board. “While it is
understandable that some of our colleagues will have little interest in
revisiting the case and the ethical questions it raises, we are persuaded that
there is a disturbing and unjustifiable gap between how the University
responded to this death and the careful, critical investigation it warrants.”
Markingson
committed suicide in May 2004 after taking Seroquel, a psychiatric drug
developed by AstraZeneca. Mary Weiss, Markingson’s mother, accused the
university of of forcibly enrolling her son in the clinical trial even though
Markingson was under an involuntary commitment order and may have been mentally
incompetent to consent to the treatment.
A
series of stories in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Mother
Jones magazine, the latter written by Elliott, suggested an improper financial
relationship between university researchers and AstraZeneca, including
incentive payments to recruit and retain patients for the study instead of
providing standard therapy.
University
officials deny the accusations, noting the Food and Drug Administration,
Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and Board of Medical Practice all cleared
the school.
“None
found fault with the University, none found fault with the involved faculty,
and none found any causal link between the … trial and the unfortunate death of
Dan Markingson,” the university’s general
counsel, Mark Rotenberg, wrote in
response to the Mother Jones story.
In
addition, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by Weiss.
“Faculty
in our department of psychiatry have made great progress in pursuit of
effective treatments for mental health disease,” Rotenberg wrote. “The
department’s work — much through clinical trial efforts — has made a
significant impact through its community clinical outreach and treatment
programs. However, these conditions remain today among the most difficult to
manage and treat. It is that challenge which our psychiatry faculty is seeking
to address with its clinical research.”
In
a separate interview, Elliott, who recently wrote a book critical of the drug
industry, said the FDA investigation did not address key information.
“There
is lots that the FDA report missed, and the FDA refuses to answer questions,”
Elliott wrote in an e-mail. “The FDA did not mention the conflicts of interest,
the financial incentives to enroll subjects and keep them in the study, the
failure to exclude subjects at risk of homicide, the fact that Mary Weiss had
tried for months to get her son out of the study, or the fact that Dan
Markingson had been threatening murder when he was recruited into the study.”
“Bizarrely,
it also concluded that ‘there is nothing different about this subject than
others enrolled to suggest that he could not provide voluntary, informed
consent,’ ” Elliott wrote. “This, despite the fact that only a few days
earlier, the investigators had judged him incapable of consenting to
antipsychotic drugs.”
Elliott
also said new evidence suggests the company rigged the trial to show positive
results.
Last
year, the
Star Tribune in Minneapolis reported that court documents showed
AstraZeneca claimed its drug was superior to standard treatments for
schizophrenia, even though the drug maker knew research did not back the claim.
Dr.
Charles Schultz, chief of psychiatry at the university, presented research
backing AstraZeneca’s claims to a medical conference. Schultz claims the
company never shared its concerns with him.
Thomas Lee
Thomas Lee is the Minnesota Bureau Chief
for MedCityNews.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
City Pages
Is medical research at the U of M compromised?
In a damning new article in the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine, Dr. Carl Elliott,
a professor at the University of Minnesota's Center for
Bioethics, argues that the university's system of clinical research "has
been so thoroughly co-opted by market forces that many studies have
become little more than covert instruments for promoting drugs." Because
of the large sums of money pharmaceutical companies are paying the
university, Elliott writes, the institution is too often turning a blind
eye to glaring conflicts of interest and serious ethical lapses. In one
instance, Elliott contends it may even have lead to the death of a
study's subject.
What's been the reaction of your peers to this article?
Well, outside the medical school, and outside the university as a
whole: lots of support for me personally, and, as you'd expect, shock
that this could happen here. Inside the medical school: silence.
One should perhaps no longer be surprised to find
pharmaceutical companies suppressing unfavorable data and manipulating
studies to get the results they desire, but to read in your piece that a
respected medical institution like the university may be aiding that
deception is stunning. Why would the university risk its reputation?
Pharmaceutical industry funding is the norm for academic health
centers, not the exception. In academic medicine, working for them is
not seen as shameful; it is seen as a mark of status. For a lot of
academic physicians, being chosen by a drug company to work as a paid
consultant or speaker is like being admitted to an elite private club.
But when the head of your university's psychiatric
department, for instance, is a well-paid consultant for a pharmaceutical
company, and that company, in the interest of increasing profits,
fudges results and hides unfavorable data, why wouldn't top officials at
the U of M sound the alarm?
You could ask the same question about any of a number of scandals at the university. A couple of years ago, the Star Tribune
discovered that Leo Furcht, the co-chair of an ethics task force at the
U working on a new conflict-of-interest policy, had steered a $501,000
pharma grant into a firm he owned and which he later sold for $9.5
million in stock. When the Star Tribune asked Deborah Powell,
the dean of the medical school, why she had appointed Furcht to chair
the ethics task force, she said it was because of his "extensive
experience" devising conflict-of-interest rules. Furcht remains chair of
the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology.
You point out that in one case, a 26-year-old man named Dan Markingson
was used in a psychiatric drug study after being diagnosed as
psychotic. He committed suicide during this study. His mother begged
university researchers not to place her son in the study. She believes
carelessness on their part led directly to his death. Do you believe
this?
I asked this question of my brother, a psychiatrist on the faculty at Wake Forest University.
He said, "Look, if a mentally ill young man's mother keeps calling,
begging you to take her son out of a study because she thinks he is
going to commit suicide, you don't just ignore her. You call 911." Did
the drug given to Dan in the study cause the suicide? That's
impossible to say; you never know whether a suicide is linked to a drug
or the underlying mental illness. Did Dan get poor treatment during the
study? Yes. Were there financial incentives to enroll him in the study
and keep him in? Yes. I asked Jerome Kassirer, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine,
to comment on the case for my article, and here's what he said: "The
conflict of interest is disgusting, and it seems quite likely that the
boy's death was an indirect consequence of the financial inducements of
the study. At the very least, the university should have appointed an
independent review board, dismissed all the hospital charges, and paid
the boy's mother damages."
Do you have any support, inside the medical school, calling for some new approach to medical research?
There are a few people concerned about conflicts of interest, but
most of them seem afraid to say much. They prefer to keep their thoughts
to themselves. As my brother says, "Doctors fear drug companies like
bookies fear the mob."
(Note: Dan Markingson's mother sued the University of Minnesota and the pharmaceutical company, Astra Zeneca. It never went to trial. A district judge dismissed the suit with partial summary judgment.)
Related Content
Bioethicists ask U of M Regents to appoint
outside panel to review ethics of 2004
Dan Markingson case
By Susan Perry | Published Mon, Dec 6 2010 9:10 am
Eight University of Minnesota bioethicists have sent a letter to the university’s Board of Regents,
asking it to appoint an outside panel of experts to investigate the
ethical issues raised by the case of Dan Markingson, a young man who
committed suicide in 2004 while enrolled in a psychiatric research study
at the U of M.
“There are a number of unresolved concerns, and I think it’s time there was an outside assessment,” said Leigh Turner,
an associate professor in the Center for Bioethics, the School of
Public Health and the College of Pharmacy, in a phone interview last
week.
Leigh Turner
Student representatives to
the Board of Regents had also intended to raise the issue of conflicts
of interest at the U of M — both in the Markingson case and in the university’s handling
of the “Troubled Waters” documentary — in a report to the full board
this week. Last week, however, the board’s staff objected to “stylistic”
concerns about that section of the students’ report, and it has been
taken out of the final document that will be presented to the Board on
Friday.
A revised version of the deleted section may be
part of next semester’s report, according to Matt McGeachy, a graduate
student in the U of M’s History of Medicine program. McGeachy, who
serves as a student representative to the board, drafted the deleted
section.
“I thought [the conflict-of-interest issues
surrounding the Markingson case] were sufficiently important to be
brought up to the board,” he told me last week.
“It was really troubling to find out that this
study, which was entirely funded by the pharmaceutical industry, had
resulted in the tragic and unnecessary death of a young man not so far
from the age of a number of our graduate and undergraduate students,”
McGeachy added.
Several ethical violations cited
As described in a 2008 series of articles in the Pioneer Press and in a lengthy article in Mother Jones last August (written by Dr. Carl Elliott,
a professor of bioethics at the U of M and another signator to the
letter to the Board of Regents), Dan Markingson was 26 years old and
experiencing psychotic episodes when he was recruited into a U of M
clinical trial of the antipsychotic drug Seroquel (quetiapine). The study was funded by the drug’s manufacturer, the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca.
How Markingson was recruited — as well as other details of the case —
“suggest serious problems in the way that clinical research is
conducted and overseen at the university,” the eight bioethicists state
in their letter to the Board of Regents. “Those ethical violations
include: recruiting a mentally ill, possibly incompetent subject into a
research study while he was under an involuntary commitment order; large
financial conflicts of interest on the part of the university
researchers conducting the study; a payment structure for the study
which included financial incentives to recruit and retain subjects
rather than provide them with standard therapy; an allegedly biased
study design aimed at generating positive results for AstraZeneca rather
than investigating a genuine scientific question; the failure of
university researchers to address the legitimate concerns of Mr.
Markingson’s mother, Mary Weiss, who warned that her son was suicidal
and who attempted for months to have him removed from the study as his
mental condition deteriorated; the apparent development of a specialized
unit in Fairview Hospital designed to identify severely mentally ill
subjects for recruitment into research studies; and finally, a failure
of the institutional oversight system for protecting human subjects of
research.”
The letter acknowledges that the U of M and
AstraZeneca were cleared of blame by a Food and Drug Administration
investigator in 2005, but stresses that the ethical problems surrounding
the case remain “serious enough to warrant further investigation.”
“Patients participating in research studies at the
University of Minnesota need to be confident that the university is
doing everything it can to protect them from harm,” the bioethicists
write in the letter. “For this reason, we respectfully request that the
Board of Regents appoint an impartial panel of experts in research
ethics and university governance of medical research to investigate the
Markingson case, particularly any larger structural or financial
conditions that might have played a role in his death and which may
still be putting patients at risk.”
Potential financial conflicts
“There’s
a financial backdrop to all of this,” explained Turner in my interview
with him. “The University of Minnesota benefited financially from the
study being done here. More than $300,000 went to the Department of
Psychiatry.”
According to Elliott’s Mother Jones article, the U
of M psychiatry department earned $15,648 for each person it enrolled in
the Seroquel study. Elliott also reported that at the time Markingson
entered the study, the U of M was having a serious problem recruiting
subjects and risked being dropped by AstraZeneca as one of the study's
trial sites.
The two U of M psychiatrists who led the study, Drs. Charles S. Schulz and Stephen C. Olson,
personally earned a combined $811,045 between 2002 and 2008 from
pharmaceutical companies, including $261,364 from AstraZeneca.
U of M cleared in earlier reviews
In a statement
issued last August, after the Mother Jones article appeared, Mark B.
Rotenberg, general counsel for the U of M, said that issues raised in
that article “have been reviewed by federal, state, and academic bodies
over the last five years, including the FDA, the Hennepin County
District Court, the Board of Medical Practice and Minnesota Attorney
General’s office, and the university and its IRB. None found fault with
the university, none found fault with the involved faculty, and none
found any causal link between the [Seroquel] trial and the unfortunate
death of Dan Markingson.”
Markingson’s mother, Mary Weiss, brought a
malpractice suit against Olson, which was eventually settled for $75,000
(an amount that failed to cover Weiss’ legal costs, according to
Elliott). A lawsuit against the U of M, AstraZeneca, Olson and Schulz
was dismissed, however, in 2008 with a partial summary judgment. The
judge ruled that there was no case or statue that supported the
contention that AstraZeneca — or any pharmaceutical company — had a duty
to put the interest of its research subjects above those of the
company.
Does new policy go far enough?
The
U of M adopted a new conflict-of-interest policy in August — a policy
that now covers all researchers in the Academic Health Center, including
those in the Department of Psychiatry.
Turner, however, believes the new policy fails to
respond in any meaningful way to many of the specific problems that came
up in the Markingson case. “It doesn’t in any way address whether
[Markingson] had a decision-making capacity or why his mother wasn’t
contacted and her concerns addressed,” he said.
Nor does he believe the new policy adequately deals
with the financial conflict of interests that arise when researchers —
and the university itself — rely so heavily on industry funding. “It’s
an important revenue stream," he said, "and they’re not going to want to
see it go away,” particularly now, when government funding of research
is decreasing.
Financial conflicts of interest are a long-standing
problem at research universities, said Turner, “and the
conflict-of-interest policy that the University of Minnesota has drafted
doesn’t really get at that problem.”
The U of M’s new policy is “more about managing
conflicts of interest than eliminating them,” he added. “Managing
usually means disclosure. But some kinds of conflict of interests —
financial ones, in particular — just need to be eliminated.”
Won’t go away
Turner said he's
hopeful that the Board of Regents will appoint a panel of experts to do
an independent investigation of the Markingson case. “I can understand a
sense of reluctance or unwillingness to revisit it and see what was
done and why — and what could have been done better,” he said. But the
university must resist the temptation to “sweep this under the rug,” he
added.
“These things tend to recur when they’re not
properly addressed,” he said. “An outside investigation might generate
some response. If not, this topic will come back again and again until
it is addressed.”
In addition to Turner and Elliott, the U of M bioethicists who signed the letter to the Board of Regents are Dianne Bartels, assistant professor in the Center for Bioethics and Department of Medicine; Joan Liaschenko, professor in the Center for Bioethics and School of Nursing; Mary Faith Marshall, professor in the Center for Bioethics and Department of Family Medicine and Community Health; Dr. John Song, associate professor in the Center for Bioethics and Department of Medicine; Susan Craddock,
chair of the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and an
afficiliate faculty member in the Center for Bioethics; and Joan Tronto, professor in the Department of Political Science and an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Bioethics.
For more information
A website with a link to the letter to the Board of Regents and other documents can be found here. You can read Elliott’s Mother Jones article about the Markingson case here. (Dan Markingson's story is also featured in Elliott's most recent book, "White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine.")
The U of M’s response to the Mother Jones piece can be found here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STAR TRIBUNE
Documents raise questions about a drug study by U
of M psychiatrist S. Charles Schulz. He says there is a
"misunderstanding" about the results he reported.
In the spring of 2000, Dr. S. Charles Schulz attended a national
medical conference to present favorable research on a new psychiatric
drug called Seroquel.
Schulz, chief of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, reported
that the drug was "significantly superior" to the old gold-standard
treatment for schizophrenia. In a press release by the manufacturer,
AstraZeneca, he touted the "dramatic benefits" of Seroquel's class of
drugs.
But newly released documents show that AstraZeneca knew the research
didn't support the claim -- and knew two months before Schulz went
public with it.
The disclosures have raised questions about Schulz's ties to the
company as a paid consultant at a time when Congress and the university
itself are intensifying their scrutiny of potential conflicts of
interest in medical research.
"The data don't look good," an AstraZeneca official, John Tumas, warned in an e-mail on March 23, 2000. That month, an internal company analysis
of the raw data concluded: "It is clear that a claim of superiority for
Seroquel over Haloperidol (Haldol) could not be generated using these
data."
In an interview this week, Schulz said the pharmaceutical company
never shared its doubts about Seroquel, which went on to become a
blockbuster, with annual sales of $4.5 billion today. "I don't recall
anybody calling up and saying, oh my goodness, we have this problem," he
said.
At the same time, Schulz acknowledged that his own study did not
really show that Seroquel was more effective than the older drug.
"That's a bit of a misunderstanding," he said. "I think the overall
message is that it works about the same."
In a statement, AstraZeneca spokesman Tony Jewell said Schulz
accurately presented the data at the American Psychiatric Association
(APA) meeting in 2000, and "clearly explained the methodology he used.''
Dr. Frank Cerra, the university's senior vice president for health
sciences, noted that medical research can be interpreted in more than
one way, and cautioned against jumping to conclusions based on Internet
documents. He said he was not familiar with details of the Schulz study,
but that there was nothing unusual about his relationship with
AstraZeneca. "I think the role of university professors, particularly in
health sciences, is to engage with the pharmaceutical industry and the
device industry," he said. As long as Schulz disclosed his ties, he
said, "then the university is OK with this."
Today, Seroquel is widely used worldwide for a range of psychiatric
conditions, from schizophrenia to borderline personality disorders. In
fact, next month AstraZeneca, a $32 billion British concern, will ask
the Food and Drug Administration for approval to market it for major
depression, which could greatly expand the drug's patient base and
sales.
However, experts say doubts remain about the value of the drug. "It
does work, but it's not necessarily better than the pills that are
already out there,'' said Dr. Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist at Tufts
University in Boston. "And it does have some nasty side effects.''
Ed Blizzard, a Houston lawyer who is handling consumer lawsuits
against the company, said he believes AstraZeneca inflated the drug's
value. "They marketed it as having unsurpassed efficacy," he said.
The internal company documents became public last month in connection
with a federal court case in Florida over Seroquel's side effects.
Since the documents started circulating on the Internet, at least one
outside critic has called for an investigation by the university.
"Is it any wonder that psychiatric research, and by implication
psychiatric practice, is losing credibility due to the economic
influence of big pharmaceutical companies," wrote Brent Robbins, a
psychologist at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, on a blog site of
the Society for Humanistic Psychology.
Robbins said he had contacted the Medical School to look into the
matter. "How can we trust science when the people who are conducting the
science are only publishing or presenting on findings that favor the
economic well-being of the company for which they are hired?'' Robbins
asked.
Schulz denied that his ties to the company affected his research. "I
don't think I would have been comfortable standing in front of a poster
that exaggerated the results," he said.
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