Feeding on children

Psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Biederman has been in the news quite a bit recently. First we learned that while championing the use of powerful anti-psychotic drugs on toddlers, he was accepting over a million dollars from drug companies without disclosing it (Harvard Researchers Face Heat Over Drug Company Payments).

Now we learn:

Newly disclosed court documents portray Dr. Joseph Biederman, a leading Harvard child psychiatrist, as courting drug company money by promising that his work at Massachusetts General Hospital would help promote the use of antipsychotic drugs for youngsters diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

We also learn:

In one 1999 e-mail, a Janssen employee seeking to make sure Biederman receives $3,000 that the company owes him writes frantically to his superiors: "Dr. Biederman is not someone to jerk around. He is a very powerful national figure in child psych and has a very short fuse."

Does that sound like a man dedicated to the furtherance of science or a money-motivated ghoul feeding off a sector of society that is least able to defend itself against such abuses?

Read the article and make up your own mind: Papers reveal push on drug firm funds.

Other related articles:
Congressional investigation of Harvard psychiatrist