words to ponder
David Healy
Little Pharma made profits by making novel compounds; Big Pharma does it by marketing. Doctors say they consume (prescribe) medication according to the evidence, so marketers design and run trials to increase a drug's use. They select the trials, data and authors that suit, publish in quality journals, facilitate incorporate in guidelines, then exhort doctors to practice evidence-based medicine. Because 'they're worth it', doctors consume branded high-cost but less effective 'evidence-based' derivatives of older compounds making these drugs worth more than their weight in gold. Posted parcels meanwhile are tracked far more accurately than adverse treatment effects on patients.
The British Journal of Psychiatry (2009); 194, 85. doi: 10.1192/bjp. 194. 1.85
Sigmund Freud
The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.
On his seventieth birthday (1926); from Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.
Letter to an American mother's plea to cure her son's homosexuality (1935)
In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?
1931 Letter to Dr. David Feuchtwang. Quoted in Rice, Emanuel (1990). Freud and Moses: The Long Journey Home. SUNY Press, p. 25
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