Academic and Scientific Journals

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares99 Views

    Three MDMA Studies Are Retracted by Scientific Journal

    by

    The journal Psychopharmacology has retracted three papers about MDMA-assisted therapy based on what the publication said was unethical conduct at one of the study sites where the research took place.Several of the papers’ authors are affiliated with Lykos Therapeutics, the drug company whose application for MDMA-assisted therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder was rejected last week by the Food and Drug Administration. The company said the research in the retracted papers was not part of its application to the F.D.A. In declining to approve Lykos’s application, the agency cited concerns about missing data and problems with the way the company’s study was designed, according to a statement released by Lykos on Friday.The F.D.A. has asked Lykos to conduct an additional clinical trial of its MDMA-assisted therapy, which would have been the first psychedelic medicine to win approval by federal regulators. Lykos has said it would appeal the decision.The journal retraction was first reported by Stat, the health and medical news website.On Sunday, Lykos said that it disagreed with Psychopharmacology’s decision and that it would file an official complaint with the Committee on Publication Ethics, a nonprofit that sets guidelines for academic publications.“The articles remain scientifically sound and present important contributions to the study of potential treatments for PTSD,” the company said in the statement.The incident cited by Psychopharmacology has been well documented. In 2015, an unlicensed Canadian therapist who took part in the trial engaged in a sexual relationship with a participant after the conclusion of the trial’s dosing sessionsIn civil court documents, the patient, Meaghan Buisson, said she was sexually assaulted by the therapist, Richard Yensen, who at the time was working alongside his wife, a licensed therapist. Mr. Yensen has said the relationship was consensual and initiated by Ms. Buisson. Six months after the final session, she moved from Vancouver to Cortes Island, in British Columbia, where the couple lived, according to court documents. The relationship between patient and practitioner continued for more than a year, the documents said. Professional associations in both Canada and the United States prohibit sexual relationships between psychologists and patients for at least two years after their final session. The incident helped highlight some of the challenges associated with psychedelic medicine, which can render patients especially vulnerable during dosing sessions. For that reason, most clinical trials involving psychedelic compounds require the presence of two mental health professionals. (Lykos’s trials with MDMA require only one of the practitioners to be licensed.)The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, is the nonprofit that carried out the research and later created Lykos to market its proprietary MDMA-assisted therapy. The association publicly acknowledged the incident in 2019, adding that it had been reported to the F.D.A. and to Canadian health authorities.The company acknowledged on Sunday that it had failed to notify Psychopharmacology about the violations, but it said that the oversight should have been addressed through a correction, not a retraction. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      New England Journal of Medicine Ignored Nazi Atrocities, Historians Find

      by

      The New England Journal of Medicine published an article condemning its own record during World War II.A new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the oldest and most esteemed publications for medical research, criticizes the journal for paying only “superficial and idiosyncratic attention” to the atrocities perpetrated in the name of medical science by the Nazis.The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “racial science.”In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after World War II ended.The new article, published in this week’s issue of the journal, is part of a series started last year to address racism and other forms of prejudice in the medical establishment. Another recent article described the journal’s enthusiastic coverage of eugenics throughout the 1930s and ’40s.“Learning from our past mistakes can help us going forward,” said the journal’s editor, Dr. Eric Rubin, an infectious disease expert at Harvard. “What can we do to ensure that we don’t fall into the same sorts of objectionable ideas in the future?”In the publication’s archives, Dr. Abi-Rached discovered a paper endorsing Nazi medical practices: “Recent changes in German health insurance under the Hitler government,” a 1935 treatise written by Michael Davis, an influential figure in health care, and Gertrud Kroeger, a nurse from Germany. The article praised the Nazis’ emphasis on public health, which was infused with dubious ideas about Germans’ innate superiority.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More