Charles M. Beasley, Jr and Roy Tamura: What We Know and Do Not Know by Conventional Statistical Standards About Whether a Drug Does or Does Not Cause a Specific Side Effect (Adverse Drug Reaction)Overview

Jay Amsterdam’s comment on Barry Blackwell’s comment

        I just read Barry Blackwell’s terrific commentary on your excellent series of articles describing “What We Know and Do Not Know…” about psychotropic drug side effects, in this week’s INHN posting (April 9, 2020). I always knew that there was something different about your approach to clinical psychopharmacology – and that you were, of sorts, different from other researchers based in Pharma.

        Back in the early 90s, when I first worked with you as the lead scientist on the Lilly HCEX long-term fluoxetine trial, I suspected that you were a fish swimming upstream, out of familiar waters,  against the current of academia. In fact, there were times when I wondered what the reward was at Lilly for an academic-minded individual like yourself (beyond mere financial reward). Despite some minor professional ups and downs between us, during the highly successful HCEX project, I always admired your scholarly intellect and concise approach to problem solving. I do not believe that I could have happily survived in industry that regulated what I could think or say. I probably would not have lasted very long in that environment. I did interview for several positions at a few Pharma companies in the early to mid 1990s – always with you in mind, as a role model.  However, at the time, I feared that I could not survive in an atmosphere where the epistemological approach to clinical trials was: “Dr. Amsterdam, we value your opinion; and, when we want it, we’ll give it to you”! Of course, this simplistic view of industry writ small was a reflection of my own intellectual and personal short-coming; and, thankfully, I recognized its presence and did not bail from academia, as I seemed to require the confusion and intellectual disorganization of academic research to survive. (Note – Back in those Halcyon Days of pharmaceutical industry research, I had absolutely no knowledge or insight into the academic corruption and intellectual dishonesty that was brewing all around us within the field of psychopharmacology research.  At the time, I was a hopelessly romantic, young  researcher in search of fact. I didn’t know what a KOL was until February 2011). 

        Despite all of the seismic changes that have occurred in our field over the past 35 years , it has been a privilege for me to have played in the same intellectual sand box with a scholar like yourself. Who knows, perhaps there may even be a future project on which we may collaborate, once again.

Reference:

Blackwell B. Final comment (Charles M. Beasley, Jr., and Roy Tamura: What We Know and Do Not Know by Conventional Statistical Standards About Whether a Drug Does or Does Not Cause a Specific Side Effect [Adverse Drug Reaction]). inhn.org.ebooks. April 9, 2020.

June 25, 2020