University of Miami under fire for hiring psychiatrist who took millions in Pharma funds and was “pharma pimping for Paxil”

Bernard Carroll, former head of psychiatry at Duke University and once Charles Nemeroff’s boss, said parts of Nemeroff’s work involved Paxil, a GlaxoSmithKline antidepressant. “Basically, he was doing basic science pimping for Paxil to produce talking points,” Carroll told The Herald in an e-mail Thursday. “All he ever produced was speculation but that was enough to satisfy Glaxo marketing. . . . I have been exposing his shenanigans for some years.”

John Dorschner
The Miami Herald
November 6, 2009

Charles Nemeroff, an Atlanta psychiatrist who was the subject of a Senate investigation concerning huge sums he received from drug companies, has been named chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Miami.

Last year Nemeroff, as the top psychiatrist at Emory University, was the focus of an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said he was concerned about the millions the psychiatrist received from drug companies while conducting supposedly unbiased research for the National Institutes of Health on drugs made by the companies he was receiving money from.

On Thursday, Pascal Goldschmidt, dean of UM medical school, called Nemeroff “an exceptional psychiatrist and an exceptional scientist who has one issue in which he recognizes he made a mistake,” in not telling Emory how much he was getting from drug makers.

Goldschmidt said he had read investigative reports from Emory about Nemeroff’s activities and Emory found nothing to indicate that payments the psychiatrist received had in any way influenced his research results.

Elsewhere, opinions are divided.

The former head of psychiatry at Duke University told The Miami Herald Thursday that Nemeroff was “economical with the truth” and his work can’t be trusted, while the leader of the Columbia University psychiatry program said Nemeroff was a top-flight scientist and he had never seen any bias in his work.

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