Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Health Care Renewal on the Markingson suicide

 Dr. Roy Poses of Brown University weighs in on the University of Minnesota's inadequate response to the Markingson case on  Health Care Renewal.  He concludes:
 
"Of course, since Mr Rotenberg is responsible for, among other things, reducing the university's legal liability, one could see how he might not want to delve further into this case.  As we noted earlier, it is not clear that previous "exhaustive" investigations asked the questions that needed to be asked, or had access to all the relevant data.  The issues are not whether their was criminal conduct, or even civil liability, but whether the university is presiding over good science and protection of research subjects.

So we should be worried, of course, that commercial firms sponsor research on human beings mainly to serve marketing objectives, and that university faculty and administrators go along, allowing their formerly prestigious universities' names to be added to the research in exchange for the money they so much want to keep themselves living in the style to which they are accustomed. We ought to be particularly worried when these universities seem to forget about their mission to find and disseminate new knowledge in favor of defending the work that continues to bring in the money."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

According to Mr. Rotenberg the highly acclaimed department of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota has been on the cutting-edge of treating mental illness and helping the patient in need. When actually they have done none of the above. It's been a steady flow of the same old clinical trials using the same drugs for the same pharmaceutical companies, with the exception of the occasional Seroquel study for "public speaking." The psychiatry department has never had any earthshaking discoveries, just the same old results that somehow get 'misunderstood' or 'mis-communicated' all the while filling the bank accounts of the so-called investigators. The saying is doing the same thing over and over again is the definition of insanity and we all are "border-line" for thinking there is ever going to be a different result from the department of psychiatry. The only "chemical imbalance" is believing they really care about finding a cure.