(Instead of a traditional blog post, this post is a collection of 'notes, quotes, and comments.' People need to know- and to spread the word- that more and more individuals in all age groups are becoming like the little fellows in the picture above: guinea pigs in a money-making industry).
One book I highly recommend to everyone is SELLING SICKNESS: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients; written by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels. The authors introduce the book with some information that should alarm everyone: “Thirty years ago, the head of one of the world's best-known drug companies made some very candid comments. Close to retirement at the time, Merck's aggressive chief executive Henry Gadsden told Fortune magazine of his distress that the company's potential markets had been limited to sick people. Suggesting he'd rather Merck to be more like chewing gum manufacturer Wrigley's, Gadsden said it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be able to 'sell to everyone.' Three decades on, the late Henry Gadsden's dream has come true. The marketing strategies of the world's biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy and the well. The ups and downs of daily life have become mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more ordinary people are turned into patients.”
That should be enough to cause you to hesitate before accepting a diagnosis and filling a prescription, but there’s more:
“ASTROTURFING: fake grassroots campaigns by public relations professionals in the pay of large corporations..’ including, but not limited to ‘patient-advocacy groups.’ Around the web, if not other places, you can find quantities of groups allegedly for and by individuals who have various medical or mental health issues- guess who funds these groups..
You may have seen celebrities on tv and in print publications, talking about a condition and the ‘drug’ for it; the authors state celebrities receive between $20,000 and $2million for these ads- not only advertising drugs, but advertising disease.
If you are a parent, you should be interested in this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/08/11/do-the-new-merck-hpv-ads-guilt-trip-parents-or-tell-hard-truths-both/?utm_term=.3d477aa81e81
Quite a few years ago, when this drug was making the news- in addition to a former governor’s attempt to make it mandatory for all sixth-grade schoolgirls- there were already reports on serious complications from the vaccine. I also learned the teenage daughter of a longtime friend died from it- and the settlement my friend received from the pharmaceutical company could not make up for the loss of a child. Yet the ads continue on television, and I recently saw a billboard urging individuals to get the vaccine.
Along with that: the influence ‘Pharma’ has on the FDA and similar agencies that are supposed to look out for consumers’ best interests.
And the role of health care provider has come to this: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/07/19/outrageous-ways-big-pharma-bribed-doctors-shill-drugs/
While SELLING SICKNESS primarily focuses on the medical aspects of this issue, the mental health side comes in in the 2015 edition of ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC, written by Robert Whitaker.
One topic Whitaker addresses: the old myth of ‘chemical imbalance.’ While it was known decades ago that mental health problems caused by ‘chemical imbalance in the brain’ was not based on facts, he provides proof obtained from research that numerous psychiatric drugs can actually cause chemical imbalances- and that this is one reason individuals who use the drugs get worse rather than better.
Whitaker’s book provides alarming information on the increasing SSDI and SSI rolls- including how misdiagnosing and drugging children has resulted in “the number of severely mentally ill children under six years of age receiving SSI has tripled from 2000 to 2007.” He relates that when two major pharmaceutical companies wanted to expand antipsychotics sales to children, a Boston psychiatrist ‘provided the diagnostic framework’- advising that any and all conduct or behavioral issues in children be labeled ‘juvenile bipolar illness.’ The youngest children are not only being given dangerous drugs, but in many cases ‘cocktails’ of multiple drugs.
A third book- I don’t want to give the author or his book any publicity, but he wrote about a well-known antidepressant, claiming it can be useful for other purposes. He claims by using the drug, a person can change his or her inborn, normal personality traits and temperament. He states it can affect a person’s morals, transform a person’s Self, and that it is ‘compassionate’ to give the drug to individuals who have no psychiatric diagnosis. The author- a long-practicing psychiatrist- admits the pharmaceutical companies develop a drug, and then develop ‘conditions’ to use it for. If all of this isn’t alarming enough, information on the time-frame should be: he listed a variety of popular medications in 1997 as being ‘well-tolerated’- you can find these drugs mentioned these days in television advertisements, letting you know where you can find legal help ‘if you or a loved one’ suffered serious complications from using one of the drugs.
This particular author uses the phrase creeping brackets- similar to what I refer to as casting the net- specifically, enlarging the diagnostic criteria for virtually any and all medical and psychiatric conditions. The authors of SELLING SICKNESS addressed this, too- along with the complications, and occasionally deaths, that occurred from well or nearly well individuals taking inappropriate drugs. In one area, for example, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone I’d known who had not claimed to be ‘bipolar;’ I had no way of knowing whether their health care providers were completely ignorant about this term, or whether they were simply taken advantage of by providers who wanted benefits from drug companies and longterm patients.
While ‘creeping brackets’ have been occurring in a variety of conditions, another that I feel bears special noting is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is said to be a normal reaction to an extremely abnormal experience- when a person either experiences or witnesses a life-threatening traumatic incident. Experts are also aware it is usually curable. However- neither the magnitude of an incident nor the range of extreme symptoms needed for a diagnosis must apply for health care providers to state ‘PTSD,’ and, along with it, label it a mental illness, incurable, and must be treated on a longterm or lifelong basis with drugs. To show how extreme it’s become, attempting to claim virtually anything difficult, unpleasant, or uncomfortable is a ‘trauma’ that deserves a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, one example I found was moving- that is, relocating to a different place. I cannot even imagine the reactions of war veterans, rape victims, or Holocaust survivors, if they were to hear the modern definition of ‘trauma.’
If a person visits a doctor, attends school, or resides in a long-term elder-care facility, he or she is not immune to the pressure. It is getting worse, but it is not new. In addition to my posts on children and the elderly, the news in early 1988 disclosed the information that a popular hospital in Chicago experimented on healthy pregnant women without their knowledge or consent- they were given a drug designed to treat epilepsy, told the drug was prenatal vitamins, to find if it would cause birth defects. During the last couple of years, the drug has often come up in ads for lawsuits- babies born with serious birth defects after the drug was given to pregnant women for off-label purposes. In other words, it was known nearly three decades ago that it was dangerous, but instead of pulling it off the market or limiting its use to non-pregnant women, expectant mothers have continued to receive the drug for other purposes, and continue to have babies with birth defects serious enough to impact the rest of their lives.
Adults of all ages, adolescents, children, kids in foster care, preschoolers, and even infants are all within the reach of pharmaceutical companies and the health care providers who stand to gain from the association. It’s time to put a stop to this- to hold those who misdiagnose and prescribe inappropriately accountable for their negligence and greed.
One book I highly recommend to everyone is SELLING SICKNESS: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients; written by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels. The authors introduce the book with some information that should alarm everyone: “Thirty years ago, the head of one of the world's best-known drug companies made some very candid comments. Close to retirement at the time, Merck's aggressive chief executive Henry Gadsden told Fortune magazine of his distress that the company's potential markets had been limited to sick people. Suggesting he'd rather Merck to be more like chewing gum manufacturer Wrigley's, Gadsden said it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be able to 'sell to everyone.' Three decades on, the late Henry Gadsden's dream has come true. The marketing strategies of the world's biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy and the well. The ups and downs of daily life have become mental disorders, common complaints are transformed into frightening conditions, and more and more ordinary people are turned into patients.”
That should be enough to cause you to hesitate before accepting a diagnosis and filling a prescription, but there’s more:
“ASTROTURFING: fake grassroots campaigns by public relations professionals in the pay of large corporations..’ including, but not limited to ‘patient-advocacy groups.’ Around the web, if not other places, you can find quantities of groups allegedly for and by individuals who have various medical or mental health issues- guess who funds these groups..
You may have seen celebrities on tv and in print publications, talking about a condition and the ‘drug’ for it; the authors state celebrities receive between $20,000 and $2million for these ads- not only advertising drugs, but advertising disease.
If you are a parent, you should be interested in this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/08/11/do-the-new-merck-hpv-ads-guilt-trip-parents-or-tell-hard-truths-both/?utm_term=.3d477aa81e81
Quite a few years ago, when this drug was making the news- in addition to a former governor’s attempt to make it mandatory for all sixth-grade schoolgirls- there were already reports on serious complications from the vaccine. I also learned the teenage daughter of a longtime friend died from it- and the settlement my friend received from the pharmaceutical company could not make up for the loss of a child. Yet the ads continue on television, and I recently saw a billboard urging individuals to get the vaccine.
Along with that: the influence ‘Pharma’ has on the FDA and similar agencies that are supposed to look out for consumers’ best interests.
And the role of health care provider has come to this: http://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/07/19/outrageous-ways-big-pharma-bribed-doctors-shill-drugs/
While SELLING SICKNESS primarily focuses on the medical aspects of this issue, the mental health side comes in in the 2015 edition of ANATOMY OF AN EPIDEMIC, written by Robert Whitaker.
One topic Whitaker addresses: the old myth of ‘chemical imbalance.’ While it was known decades ago that mental health problems caused by ‘chemical imbalance in the brain’ was not based on facts, he provides proof obtained from research that numerous psychiatric drugs can actually cause chemical imbalances- and that this is one reason individuals who use the drugs get worse rather than better.
Whitaker’s book provides alarming information on the increasing SSDI and SSI rolls- including how misdiagnosing and drugging children has resulted in “the number of severely mentally ill children under six years of age receiving SSI has tripled from 2000 to 2007.” He relates that when two major pharmaceutical companies wanted to expand antipsychotics sales to children, a Boston psychiatrist ‘provided the diagnostic framework’- advising that any and all conduct or behavioral issues in children be labeled ‘juvenile bipolar illness.’ The youngest children are not only being given dangerous drugs, but in many cases ‘cocktails’ of multiple drugs.
A third book- I don’t want to give the author or his book any publicity, but he wrote about a well-known antidepressant, claiming it can be useful for other purposes. He claims by using the drug, a person can change his or her inborn, normal personality traits and temperament. He states it can affect a person’s morals, transform a person’s Self, and that it is ‘compassionate’ to give the drug to individuals who have no psychiatric diagnosis. The author- a long-practicing psychiatrist- admits the pharmaceutical companies develop a drug, and then develop ‘conditions’ to use it for. If all of this isn’t alarming enough, information on the time-frame should be: he listed a variety of popular medications in 1997 as being ‘well-tolerated’- you can find these drugs mentioned these days in television advertisements, letting you know where you can find legal help ‘if you or a loved one’ suffered serious complications from using one of the drugs.
This particular author uses the phrase creeping brackets- similar to what I refer to as casting the net- specifically, enlarging the diagnostic criteria for virtually any and all medical and psychiatric conditions. The authors of SELLING SICKNESS addressed this, too- along with the complications, and occasionally deaths, that occurred from well or nearly well individuals taking inappropriate drugs. In one area, for example, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone I’d known who had not claimed to be ‘bipolar;’ I had no way of knowing whether their health care providers were completely ignorant about this term, or whether they were simply taken advantage of by providers who wanted benefits from drug companies and longterm patients.
While ‘creeping brackets’ have been occurring in a variety of conditions, another that I feel bears special noting is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD is said to be a normal reaction to an extremely abnormal experience- when a person either experiences or witnesses a life-threatening traumatic incident. Experts are also aware it is usually curable. However- neither the magnitude of an incident nor the range of extreme symptoms needed for a diagnosis must apply for health care providers to state ‘PTSD,’ and, along with it, label it a mental illness, incurable, and must be treated on a longterm or lifelong basis with drugs. To show how extreme it’s become, attempting to claim virtually anything difficult, unpleasant, or uncomfortable is a ‘trauma’ that deserves a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, one example I found was moving- that is, relocating to a different place. I cannot even imagine the reactions of war veterans, rape victims, or Holocaust survivors, if they were to hear the modern definition of ‘trauma.’
If a person visits a doctor, attends school, or resides in a long-term elder-care facility, he or she is not immune to the pressure. It is getting worse, but it is not new. In addition to my posts on children and the elderly, the news in early 1988 disclosed the information that a popular hospital in Chicago experimented on healthy pregnant women without their knowledge or consent- they were given a drug designed to treat epilepsy, told the drug was prenatal vitamins, to find if it would cause birth defects. During the last couple of years, the drug has often come up in ads for lawsuits- babies born with serious birth defects after the drug was given to pregnant women for off-label purposes. In other words, it was known nearly three decades ago that it was dangerous, but instead of pulling it off the market or limiting its use to non-pregnant women, expectant mothers have continued to receive the drug for other purposes, and continue to have babies with birth defects serious enough to impact the rest of their lives.
Adults of all ages, adolescents, children, kids in foster care, preschoolers, and even infants are all within the reach of pharmaceutical companies and the health care providers who stand to gain from the association. It’s time to put a stop to this- to hold those who misdiagnose and prescribe inappropriately accountable for their negligence and greed.