Fuck Doctors

[compared2what?]

My fundamental complaint about pharmaceutical use in the US is exactly the issue of addiction. All drugs for chronic conditions are addictive. It is necessarily so because your body acts to achieve homeostasis, and so your body will eventually adjust to whatever regular inputs it is receiving. Physical systems are energy-minimizing entities, so that if a certain sub-system is functioning by acquisition of external resources, no extra energy will be expended to achieve the same result by other means. That's fine if your systems are so perturbed that there is no other way to "get them back" to where they should be, but for systems that are only slightly off, a regimen of a certain drug will produce unnecessary dependency. And the problem I have with dependency is that, in the US, it's a Faustian bargain. How can you be sure that you will continue to have the insurance necessary to keep buying the drugs? The anxiety creates economic dependency in other areas, and It becomes like heroin, debasing the spirit so that you are forced to do things you would otherwise never do.

That's wholly valid for people whose systems are only mildly perturbed by a chronic condition, as well as for those whose systems are perturbed by a chronic condition in some way that's amenable to resolution via non-pharmaceutical treatment.

Or, stated another way: That's wholly valid for all people who are fundamentally healthy, as well as most people with type 2 Diabetes and a few other roughly comparable complaints.

But....What recommends considering all the millions and millions of other people with severe chronic conditions and/or diseases that can be treated or alleviated with pharmaceuticals in terms of their addiction potential?

That's an innocent question, btw. I don't understand what you're saying.

C2W, i've already stated that I support the use of pharmaceuticals in many settings. I've said that in other threads and I've said it in this one. I don't think I've been unclear at all, so what is the problem here? Is there some fundamental misunderstanding on your part?

What I object to the use of pharmaceuticals in situations that are not life-threatening and where there are clear alternatives that retain autonomy for the patient, and I especially object to mandated use of pharmaceuticals (which, for example, essentially occurs when young children are prescribed medications for ADHD - so diagnosed as a result of symptoms that are often essentially normal behavior for children - and their parents are essentially threatened by social services when they don't comply - a topic which has not yet come up in this thread but is very relevant to the issue).

I also think that the statement that "[patient autonomy is] wholly valid for all people who are fundamentally healthy" has a Trojan Horse: the definition of "healthy". Am I "unhealthy" because my cholesterol runs over 200 but I otherwise have no symptoms of CVD, am weight-appropriate-to-height, etc.? Does that mean I must accept a prescription of statins, with the attendant risks? Who decides? Does my insurance have a right to deny me coverage if I reject a statin prescription and I go on to experience a heart attack next year? What if reject statins now, accept them 5 years later, and have a heart attack one year after that? Should I be denied care because of my "preexisting condition" for which I "refused to accept treatment" years before? These are real issues that are on the horizon.

I actually didn't understand you, honey. I swear. That's all. I do now. And I don't know why I didn't before. I think I maybe mighta gotten thrown by the word "addiction."

I'm glad you mentioned ADHD. I think I might have a question for you in relation to it. I have to refresh my memory though.

I'm sorry you felt criticized, and hope you forgive me for inadvertently causing you distress. But I promise and vow that really wasn't me being bitchy, bossy, or touchy. It was just me being dull-witted.

Try to remember what a range and variety of delightful personal qualities I have in future, please!

[bks]

Some people find taking them valuable, whatever the class of controversial drug we're speaking of, c2w?. Without question. But, see, that might not be as important a point as you've make it out to be [here and elsewhere]. Let me try to explain why I think that.

The reason "some people" can benefit from Big Pharma products, of course, is because those products are on the market, and they're only on the market because the drug companies were successful at bringing them to market, and they are successful at bringing them to market because the often-quite-negative side effects the drugs have on a portion of those on whom they were tested, have been effectively "managed" [by being elided, diminished, obscured, or downplayed in a variety of ways, often including out-and-out lying on the part of drugs reps to doctors, and lying on the part of companies to their drug reps, and/or those negative aspects of the drug being buried under 'false hype', and the like]. This is a wide-ranging, if not ubiquitous, feature of the system within which these drugs are brought to market. The atypical neuroleptics are not alone in this respect.

No. They're not alone. But I've got to say that if medications that cause unknown, unpublicized dangers are "ubiquitous," I'm not aware of it. (And if you think about it for a moment, how could I be?)

I am aware of the very widely publicized dangers of a small number of psychotropic medications, some of which are real and some of which are alleged.

What is "real" is only known because the efforts to suppress the real dangers known to the companies marketing their drugs failed to keep them suppressed. Suppression is endemic to the system; examples abound. If a drug has dangers, and that drug is potentially [or demonstrably] profitable, then efforts will be made to suppress the dangers of that drug. Darn near every single time I imagine, c2w?. I'd be quite glad to see examples where this wasn't the case.

Further, that "small number of psychotropic medications" includes patient populations that total or once totaled in the millions.

Because just about everybody is. To the point that resistance and/or condemnation is pretty much the baseline response to any and every mention of them, both at the mass-media level and (as far as I've observed) IRL.

There has certainly been a lot of negative press for controversial medications, and of course not all of the information presented is accurate. The impression made by that bad press, however, pales in comparison to that of the ceaseless barrage of dreamworld positivity oozing from pharmaceutical advertising underwritten not only by the companies footing the cost, but also implicitly by the authority of the medical profession which alone retains the power to prescribe them. The impact of the news stories hasn't been negligible, but the prescribing of psychotropic medications remains a fundamentally mainstream practice in little danger of diminishing significantly as a result of bad press, accurate or not.

And...Let me think. In the alleged category, I'm also aware of the very widely publicized dangers of vaccines, as is everybody else. And the very widely publicized dangers of flu shots, as is everybody else. And maybe a few others, too.

A frankly specious comparison, in that the social costs associated with the marketing of pharmaceuticals [here we mean not only acute reactions but also things like addiction, lesser dependencies and psychological impacts, long-term side effects, etc.] vastly outweighs the costs of vaccinations.

In the criminally-marketing-meds-without-mentioning-they-kill-and-damage-people category, Vioxx and Phen-Fen are the only two that have really been widely publicized that are springing to my mind right now. I mean, there have certainly been other withdrawn drugs the potential dangers of which were concealed by their makers.

There have been lots of others, but again - and here you are avoiding the key point - it's not a matter only of this or that drug that kills hundreds of people [like Vioxx] or produces suicidal thoughts. The problem is that the system does not conform to scientific norms with respect to the research and disclosure of information learned from clinical trials that bear on questions of efficacy and danger, since that research is largely controlled by companies seeking first and foremost to profit.

The dangers weren't "potential" in the case of Vioxx. Some of them were certainly known to Merck beforehand. So why are you saying "potential"?

But since they aren't numerous enough to call the phenomenon ubiquitous and weren't widely publicized, they don't really alter the equation towards the outcome of which I'm working here either way. That outcome being:

It's neither meaningfully correct nor true to say that the dangers of pharmaceutical medications are regularly elided diminished, obscured and downplayed if what you mean by it is "There's tons and tons of persuasive evidence that pharmaceutical medications offer few benefits and are rife with concealed danger, and that's just the state of play."

"Tons and tons" is my standard to meet? I've already acknowledged that pharmaceuticals offer benefits to many, many of their users. What's your independently-generated evidence that the level of concealed danger is a tolerable one? I'd be careful before I relied on any industry science, because you haven't yet dealt with the claim that they can be trusted to advance the best information about any research question.

And please consider: while your expressed desire to protect the "choice" of those who use pharmaceuticals seems admirable, unlike other famous pro-choice positions, this one will consign others [in this case, some percentage of other users of the drug] to avoidable consequences if only the drugs were marketed honestly. Zyprexa was originally at issue in this thread, you'll recall. Consider:

******
In one document dated October 9, 2000, Robert Baker, a senior Lilly clinical research physician, e-mailed colleagues about a meeting of an academic advisory board he had attended in Atlanta. It had “reinforced my impression that hyperglycemia remains quite a threat for olanzapine and may merit increasing even further medical attention and marketing focus on this topic”. Dr Baker added: “[The board was] quite impressed by the magnitude of weight gain on olanzapine and implications for glucose.”

Another internal document dated October 14-15, 1998, described the risk of weight gain as a “top threat” to Zyprexa.
http://clinpsyc.blogspot.com/2007/01/uk ... prexa.html

Then:

The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers.
Darron Cummings/Associated Press

Zyprexa is Lilly’s top-selling drug, with sales of $4.2 billion last year.

The documents, given to The Times by a lawyer representing mentally ill patients, show that Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa’s links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar — both known risk factors for diabetes.

Lilly’s own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa’s sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004.
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They weren't just concerned about it; they instructed their sales reps [who are the leading source of information for doctors about such matters] to downplay the risks. Which they did.

When you express a preference for safeguarding the choices of "some people" to avail of medications that issue from companies in a system that doesn't respect the norms of science and which also doesn't respect human life beyond its capacity to enrich those companies, you're inevitably making a value judgment that needs to be defended. Maybe it's defensible, but I don't see that you've provided a sufficient argument yet.
[/i]

So. Just to recapitulate.

I think it's correct, true, fair and accurate to say that Big Pharma is capable of lying, cheating and killing to make a buck, and that the FDA doesn't give enough of a fuck about that to put any institutional obstacles in their way.

They are not only "capable of lying." That's a mischaracterization. Given their expressed motivations and known conduct, a fairer conclusion is that Big Pharma will lie when it can reasonably be expected that they will either get away with, or take a small enough hit relative to the gain in profit to warrant the exposure of the lie. Where lying will not work, elision, downplaying, weasel-wording and the like do fine, as will efforts to stack the regulatory and legislative decks in their favor. And of course, these strategies aren't mutually exclusive.

We shouldn't forget: Pharmaceutical companies are marketing companies, basically. You understand that, right? They market more than they do anything else, certainly more than they research and develop. It's not close.

Second, the regulatory system is captured, by and large. When past industry figures are the ones doing the regulating [hardly a unique occurrence], it's a safe bet those obstacles aren't going to be all that great. One teeny example from wiki:

The United States Food and Drug Administration has also been accused of acting in the interests of the agricultural, food and pharmaceutical industries (and supporting monopolies) at the expense of consumer health interests. Monsanto's growth hormone, rBGH, which has been linked to cancer in cows and humans,[42] has been banned in numerous countries, but is unlabeled and legal in the United States.[43] Margaret Miller, a former chemical laboratory supervisor at Monsanto,[44] wrote a scientific report that was to be submitted to the FDA to obtain approval of the drug. Shortly before the report was submitted, Miller quit Monsanto to take a job at the FDA, where her first job was to approve the report she had just written while employed at Monsanto.[43][45] Michael R. Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for policy, and a former staff lawyer at Monsanto, where he worked on rBGH legal issues, wrote the FDA's labeling guidelines for rBGH.[42]

That's criminal and despicable. But it has the real properties and dimensions that it has. And confounding that does more to help than to harm them.

With all respect, you haven't really established a thing about the "real properties and dimensions" the problem has [at least, not in this discussion]. It may well turn out that you are right about those real properties and dimensions. You're really, really smart and know a lot about lots of stuff, that's pretty clear. But just as clearly, you haven't established how you've come to your assessment of the real properties and dimensions the problem has. There are some pretty intelligent people who have experience with the problem up close and personal - real up close. In fact, I've mentioned one of them to you a few months ago, and he's quite a wonder in this area. Did you get around to reading anything by him?

Speaking of costs and benefits, as you're about to when I carry the rest of your quote into my very next post.

Cheers to ya, bks.

And cheers to you! I'll see you there! Though maybe not tonight.

[bks]

All of which means that the benefits some people find in taking them will come at the cost of consigning others [and often many others] to rather horrible outcomes which they have not been properly warned about [it is another matter whether warning them would necessarily make them safer or allow them to avoid the bad outcomes. The evidence is far from clear that it would, but let's leave that for now]. That is a considerable cost for allowing those who will benefit form the drug to benefit from it, wouldn't you say? And let's be clear: within the current system, protecting the benefit those "some people" get often virtually entails the negative outcomes to those improperly-warned others.

I don't actually understand how a sick person who received a medical benefit from taking a drug would be consigning many others to a horrible outcome.\

Nor do I! But then why would I, when I never said any such silly thing???

I mean, if the warnings are improper, the fault lies with those responsible for the impropriety, not with the properly warned. Right?

Right! And where would you get the idea that I thought the beneficiaries of the drugs were responsible for the damage done to other users? I very clearly wrote "within the current system", and it's perfectly clear that within that system the parties responsible for doing the warning are the companies themselves. If one wants to extend responsibility to the regulatory agencies for ensuring warnings are appropriate, fine [but note my point about regulatory capture above]. Still, I in no way implied, nor do I believe, that the beneficiaries are consigning the injured to their injuries.


Besides which...I don't know. What are you saying here, bks? Do the benefits that some people find in drinking alcohol, smoking pot or taking entheogens come at the cost of consigning others to horrible outcomes? Because doing all three of those things can and does lead to horrible outcomes for some percentage of the people who were expecting a benefit going in. Reliably, you could even say.

Alcohol much more than the other two, obviously. But still. How is your argument any different than that? What am I missing here?

Quite a bit, actually, but I trust that this bit of confusion has been cleared up by this point?

I'm not arguing, of course, that the pharmaceutical industry is alone among major institutions w/r/t this feature.

Oh. Well, that takes care of the alcohol thing, I guess.

Well, no, it wouldn't, had I been comparing the two [which I wasn't], because the two systems of production and delivery are not remotely comparable on the key points. No one has to prescribe alcohol for you, so no medical authority is implicated in your purchase and use of it. No special expertise or clinical trials are required to understand its well-known effects. That's because there is widespread and very, very easily accessed information about the various sorts of harm it causes and can cause. Children get education about its dangers [we can debate its effectiveness] from the time they are quite small. And new kinds of alcohol are not constantly coming onto the market about which little or nothing is known by the layperson. Once you educate yourself about alcohol, you pretty much know the deal.

So the cases are really not comparable at all, in the ways relevant to the pretty easy-to-understand point I made.

You admit the atypical neuroleptics were "pushed through with shitty trials and released with a whole tsunami of completely false hype," which I'll take your word for. The bigger point - the one I haven't heard you make, or which I may have missed - pertains to the system, and not any one case within it. To paraphrase David Healy, the problem is that the system of industry-based pharmaceutical testing, and not this or that particular set of trials, does not conform to the norms of science. The pharmaceutical companies control the data they generate. They control [or greatly influence] the manner in which the papers interpreting that data are written up, and which purport to provide the scientific basis for the proper prescription and use of the medications in question. They control the major journals in which the data is published. And they understand that the bottom facts about the substances will not come out unless there is a court trial several years after they've made their hundreds of millions if not billions, and perhaps not even then.

I've never made that point because I've never needed to. It's an important one, though. But the whole thing (ie -- all vile misdeeds and shortcomings in the medical/healthcare arena) is a huge HUGE conglomeration of systemic problems, imo.

That's actually one of the reasons I object to the constant focus on the evils of pharmaceutical medications, to be honest with you. It's not like it's accidental that all the most enthusiastic and prolific disseminators of that line of argumentation are heartily supported by groups like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons ("founded in 1943 to fight socialized medicine") and....Hmm. There's another one, too. But I can't quite seem to put my finger on it.

We've been over this last point before. Criticism of psychiatry long predates anything the Co$ spews, may it rot. I myself haven't read any Co$ shit that I know of [I certainly haven't sought any out], though I have read people I later learned were in some way linked to the Co$ [you brought Peter Breggin to my attention, for instance]. But nothing I've said here relies on anything from Co$ or from anything within the reach of its tentacles.

Your point about criticisms of psychophacology [rather than psychiatry] tending to stem from Co$-linked sources has some merit, I think. My own criticism of pharma is way more nuanced than theirs. For one thing, I'm absolutely fine with people using psychotropic medications in lots of instances. I think the system is more corrupt than you do, but I'm no absolutist about it. I'm most strongly against the shift in societal norms toward the medication of people for reasons that have nothing [or very little] to do with improving their health. I'm not against self-medication and I will admit to no hysteria about the use of drugs in general. Aside from barracuda, I'll put my own drug usage up against anyone's on the forum. I like drugs! I don't like the deployment of cultural authority in the guise of helpfulness, the true aim of which is something malignant.

These days, the "business of medicine" mentality has rendered the practice of many doctors difficult to distinguish from that of drug reps. For a primer on the rapidly shifting landscape of modern medicine and the sorts of pressures facing doctors and others in this milieu, I recommend Dr. Carl Elliott's "White Coat, Black Hat." Highly readable and pretty disturbing.

But I'm confounded that you haven't felt the need to at least investigate whether the general run of practice within the industry conforms to scientific norms. Because if it does not, even if it HAD the" for-the-most-part-benign-but-with-rare-exceptions-quite-troubling" properties you ascribe to it, those properties wouldn't be fully earned, would they?

Now, I perfectly realize that unless one understands the entrenched peculiarities of the culture within the field being investigated, one is not going to be able to contribute much to an understanding of why things are as they are within that culture. The prescriptive atmospheres within institutions [of all kinds] make for interesting study, and I actually have a lot respect for the development of those prescriptive atmospheres just about everywhere they're found. I understand quite well that one can't simply read the codebook in order to get a true sense of what is permitted and what is not within a particular social arena. But just so it's clear: my criticism of Big Pharma comes from those very familiar with the prescriptive atmosphere inside the industry. These are historians of psychiatry and psychopharmacology we're talking about. They've written publicly-available books and articles.

In any event. It's not like it's accidental that all the most enthusiastic and prolific disseminators of that line of argumentation are totalitarian extremists looking for a weak and dependent populace to control. They know an Overton Window when they see it. They're gunning for your access to healthcare. By any means necessary.

And it's working. People are a whole hell of a lot more hostile to professional medicine than they were twenty years ago. After all. Ever stop to ask yourself how that came about? Because there's more than one force at work there. But I think it's fair to say that propaganda didn't have nothing to do with it.

That's the big picture, as I see it.

No arguments here about the big picture. I might quibble about how much impact propaganda has had on the level of hostility between now and 20 years ago. Some, for sure. But assuming there is greater hostility, I would hazard that this has more to do with the fact that a lot fewer people have a trusting relationship with a doctor today than they did a generation ago, and that makes them anxious and scared sometimes. Hostile, even. I don't know that trust has actually diminished, but I suspect it.
_________________

Oh! Hey! I just remembered something. I'll be right back if I can find a reference for it.

[compared2what?]

bks --

Except that we evidently don't understand one another, as far as I can tell we agree that:

* Pharma is evil, corrupt, dishonest, criminal and dangerous.

* There's no guarantee that drug trials ever adhere to acceptable scientific standards and abundant proof that they regularly don't, which is a fucking outrage and crime, given that issues of life and death are at stake.

* It's a horror and abomination that even people who can afford to get medical treatment mostly get a ten-to-twenty minute office visit and some pills for virtually every fucking condition, disorder, complaint and syndrome there is, both psychiatric and non-psychiatric, which they may or may not actually have.

* It's also a horror and an abomination that the only major categorical exception to that is a partial one -- ie, people with pretty good access to sorta decent medical care who suffer from something in the large class of unmistakably very debilitating and/or terminal illnesses that it's lucrative to treat over the long-haul -- for at least two reasons: (1) It's partial; and (2) quite a few (though not all) of the illnesses in that category mightn't have been so debilitating or life-threatening ultimately if they'd been detected early on one of those ten-to-twenty minute office visits.

________________

I don't know why you seem to think I'm disputing or minimizing any of that. I fucking volunteer information to that effect when I have any, as I did in the reply to slimmouse that you characterized as "you admit (x) but have never said (y)."

Anyway. I saw one misunderstanding I wanted to clear up in your response. And maybe there are more. (I mean that in a no-fault way -- ie, mighta been my misunderstanding, mighta been your misunderstanding, I don't know, how could I?)

So I'll go get to that.

[slomo]

I have a few bones to pick here, out of an interest in precision.

Pharma is evil, corrupt, dishonest, criminal and dangerous.

I'm not sure I am understanding that this is indeed your belief, from what might be considered a fair bit of ambiguity on your part earlier in the thread. I undertand the conversation gets heated and we don't always write exactly what we mean, but in an effort to clear things up now, it does not appear to me that this was your message before. And, as far as I'm concerned, it is such a a blanket statement that it should not be accepted in its entirety without serious qualification, anyway.

* There's no guarantee that drug trials ever adhere to acceptable scientific standards and abundant proof that they regularly don't, which is a fucking outrage and crime, given that issues of life and death are at stake.

As someone in the business, somewhat tangentially but still close enough to observe what goes on regularly, I would say that the standards are taken very seriously and adhered to much of the time. The "abundant proof" consists of a few high-profile egregious cases along with meta-analysis that documents the usual failings of all scientific research, namely publication bias that results from a reward system that penalizes null results, as well as routine conflicts-of-interest which, at least from an institutional perspective, are taken seriously. I'm not saying the business is pristine - far from it - but if we are being precise then it stands to reason that we need to take pains not to oversimplify and demonize.

As far as I'm concerned, the core issues are (1) uneven access to care (which we really do all agree on); and (2) patient autonomy, which is the one issue that I am noticing keeps getting swept under the rug. It may be my own hobby horse, but there it is.

[compared2what?]

No. They're not alone. But I've got to say that if medications that cause unknown, unpublicized dangers are "ubiquitous," I'm not aware of it. (And if you think about it for a moment, how could I be?)

I am aware of the very widely publicized dangers of a small number of psychotropic medications, some of which are real and some of which are alleged.

What is "real" is only known because the efforts to suppress the real dangers known to the companies marketing their drugs failed to keep them suppressed. Suppression is endemic to the system; examples abound. If a drug has dangers, and that drug is potentially [or demonstrably] profitable, then efforts will be made to suppress the dangers of that drug. Darn near every single time I imagine, c2w?. I'd be quite glad to see examples where this wasn't the case.

Okay. I'm lost.

Of course. Yes. When real dangers that have been suppressed by villains are known, it's because the villainy and suppression was discovered. Suppression is endemic to the system. I totally agree.

However, that doesn't equate to ubiquitous unpublicized dangers being endemic to pharmaceuticals. And it's a significant overstatement to say so. Because:

(a) many effective medications that have been out there for a long, long time doing good not harm; and

(b) so have no small number of medications the potential dangers of which were revealed when discovered and have been openly conceded ever since.

In short: Yes. And it's vile and amounts to abuse/torture/murder for profit.

But so does scarifying people away from vaccines as part of an over-arching program that also includes inducing them to spend thousands of dollars poisoning their children with chemical-castration drugs and industrial chelation agents. Not to mention the less-easy-to-characterize systematic abuses of children that frequently go hand-in-hand with that worldview. At least on the discussion boards dedicated to it that I've spent time on. Seriously. You'd never know those people were raising children and not vitamin-and-mineral regimens that produced bowel movements and tantrums, to read them.

Anyway. The reason that I made the real/alleged distinction was because I was thinking of that and other examples of cold-blooded profiteering off the misery and misfortune that rely on the kind of exaggeration that I (maybe wrongly) understood you to be making.

Because just about everybody is. To the point that resistance and/or condemnation is pretty much the baseline response to any and every mention of them, both at the mass-media level and (as far as I've observed) IRL.

There has certainly been a lot of negative press for controversial medications, and of course not all of the information presented is accurate. The impression made by that bad press, however, pales in comparison to that of the ceaseless barrage of dreamworld positivity oozing from pharmaceutical advertising underwritten not only by the companies footing the cost, but also implicitly by the authority of the medical profession which alone retains the power to prescribe them. The impact of the news stories hasn't been negligible, but the prescribing of psychotropic medications remains a fundamentally mainstream practice in little danger of diminishing significantly as a result of bad press, accurate or not.

I agree. But I don't see it as an either/or kind of thing. Telling dangerous and deadly lies about medications and/or medical treatments is an absolute abomination, no matter who does it. And it can kill people, too. It doesn't detract from the crimes and misdeeds pharma commits for profit to point to the crimes and misdeeds that people who purport to be opposed to such things also commit for profit. In fact, from an activist-not-wanting-to-be-discredited perspective, it's kind of essential. As I see it.

And...Let me think. In the alleged category, I'm also aware of the very widely publicized dangers of vaccines, as is everybody else. And the very widely publicized dangers of flu shots, as is everybody else. And maybe a few others, too.

A frankly specious comparison, in that the social costs associated with the marketing of pharmaceuticals [here we mean not only acute reactions but also things like addiction, lesser dependencies and psychological impacts, long-term side effects, etc.] vastly outweighs the costs of vaccinations.

Again, I was not comparing. I was just saying. Because it is there. And it is a problem.

In the criminally-marketing-meds-without-mentioning-they-kill-and-damage-people category, Vioxx and Phen-Fen are the only two that have really been widely publicized that are springing to my mind right now. I mean, there have certainly been other withdrawn drugs the potential dangers of which were concealed by their makers.

There have been lots of others,

I was actually trying to err on your side of the argument, but it's not important, so never mind. Misunderstanding. I was unclear. I apologize.

but again - and here you are avoiding the key point - it's not a matter only of this or that drug that kills hundreds of people [like Vioxx] or produces suicidal thoughts.

The latter is not comparable to the former. And I hate it, hate it, hate it, that the distinctions, which have very real implications for the health and well-being of vulnerable people get totally fucking buried by the highly polarized terms that are apparently the only ones in which anyone can even conceive of the issue anymore. That's a victory for propaganda and a defeat for all living beings, imo.

But I don't mean you, bks. I'm just venting.

The problem is that the system does not conform to scientific norms with respect to the research and disclosure of information learned from clinical trials that bear on questions of efficacy and danger, since that research is largely controlled by companies seeking first and foremost to profit.

The dangers weren't "potential" in the case of Vioxx. Some of them were certainly known to Merck beforehand. So why are you saying "potential"?

Because I was thinking about drugs the potential dangers of which were concealed and the potential benefits of which were loudly trumpeted by pharma. "Potential" in that context doesn't mean "not established," it means "not yet realized in the form of people unnecessarily dying for pharma's profit."

Come on. Do you really think I was trying to minimize Vioxx? Also: I AGREE WITH YOU ABOUT THE SYSTEM.

But since they aren't numerous enough to call the phenomenon ubiquitous and weren't widely publicized, they don't really alter the equation towards the outcome of which I'm working here either way. That outcome being:

It's neither meaningfully correct nor true to say that the dangers of pharmaceutical medications are regularly elided diminished, obscured and downplayed if what you mean by it is "There's tons and tons of persuasive evidence that pharmaceutical medications offer few benefits and are rife with concealed danger, and that's just the state of play."

"Tons and tons" is my standard to meet? I've already acknowledged that pharmaceuticals offer benefits to many, many of their users. What's your independently-generated evidence that the level of concealed danger is a tolerable one?

Misunderstanding. I don't know where it came from. But I don't think any level of concealed danger is tolerable. I understood you (perhaps wrongly) to be saying that unconcealed dangers were ubiquitous. "Ubiquitous" = "tons-and-tons-plus." It was that to which I was referring.

I'd be careful before I relied on any industry science, because you haven't yet dealt with the claim that they can be trusted to advance the best information about any research question.

I don't rely on any source of information without careful consideration, to the best of my ability to vet it. I swear. I'm persnickety that way.

And please consider: while your expressed desire to protect the "choice" of those who use pharmaceuticals seems admirable, unlike other famous pro-choice positions, this one will consign others [in this case, some percentage of other users of the drug] to avoidable consequences if only the drugs were marketed honestly. Zyprexa was originally at issue in this thread, you'll recall. Consider:

******
In one document dated October 9, 2000, Robert Baker, a senior Lilly clinical research physician, e-mailed colleagues about a meeting of an academic advisory board he had attended in Atlanta. It had “reinforced my impression that hyperglycemia remains quite a threat for olanzapine and may merit increasing even further medical attention and marketing focus on this topic”. Dr Baker added: “[The board was] quite impressed by the magnitude of weight gain on olanzapine and implications for glucose.”

Another internal document dated October 14-15, 1998, described the risk of weight gain as a “top threat” to Zyprexa.
http://clinpsyc.blogspot.com/2007/01/uk ... prexa.html

Then:

The drug maker Eli Lilly has engaged in a decade-long effort to play down the health risks of Zyprexa, its best-selling medication for schizophrenia, according to hundreds of internal Lilly documents and e-mail messages among top company managers.
Darron Cummings/Associated Press

Zyprexa is Lilly’s top-selling drug, with sales of $4.2 billion last year.

The documents, given to The Times by a lawyer representing mentally ill patients, show that Lilly executives kept important information from doctors about Zyprexa’s links to obesity and its tendency to raise blood sugar — both known risk factors for diabetes.

Lilly’s own published data, which it told its sales representatives to play down in conversations with doctors, has shown that 30 percent of patients taking Zyprexa gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. But Lilly was concerned that Zyprexa’s sales would be hurt if the company was more forthright about the fact that the drug might cause unmanageable weight gain or diabetes, according to the documents, which cover the period 1995 to 2004.
******

They weren't just concerned about it; they instructed their sales reps [who are the leading source of information for doctors about such matters] to downplay the risks. Which they did.

When you express a preference for safeguarding the choices of "some people" to avail of medications that issue from companies in a system that doesn't respect the norms of science and which also doesn't respect human life beyond its capacity to enrich those companies, you're inevitably making a value judgment that needs to be defended. Maybe it's defensible, but I don't see that you've provided a sufficient argument yet.
[/i]

What?

First of all, I've never said anything good about atypicals on this board. And second of all, I said that they caused weight gain and associated health problems (like diabetes, but also like hypoglycemia, as it happens) earlier on this very fucking thread.

Second of all....I don't know.

What?

My understanding is:

Eli Lilly lied, as WE AGREE pharmaceutical companies are wont to do. Their dangerous lies were revealed, as -- and try to stay with me here -- such dangers though not necessarily such lies usually are after some NOT TOLERABLE OR EXCUSABLE amount of damage has been done, due to the legal liability doctors incur when they harm rather than heal their patients.

That doesn't, in any way, shape or form, make the systematic dishonesty and criminality of pharma TOLERABLE OR EXCUSABLE OR ANYTHING BESIDES CONTEMPTIBLE AND DESPICABLE. But it does reveal and identify the dangers, which then not only can be guarded against when possible and avoided when not possible, but have to be, as a matter of unambiguous legal liability.

In reality, there are shitty and irresponsible doctors who don't meet their obligations in that regard. But that's another and separate (though related) INTOLERABLE systemic problem.

As a matter of fact, as long as we're on that subject of other, separate-though-related INTOLERABLE systemic problems, in reality, the patients who are at the highest risk of harm from Zyprexa are so vulnerable to sustaining it (and so invisible and so stigmatized by society and so ill and so desperate and so lost and so alone) that if the only bad thing that happened to them as a result of the INEXCUSABLE AND INTOLERABLE lack of care (medical or other) they receive from anybody apart from pills is some irreversible tardive dyskinesia?

They'd probably be somewhere in the 90th percentile of treatment success stories for acute chronic psychosis.

And I don't, by any means, say that as a way of minimizing or justifying the incidence of tardive dyskinesia, for which there's no fucking excuse at all. I say it because there's plenty of evil to go around. And all of it needs to be acknowledged, identified and understood in order to be addressed. Not just the fun and righteous parts with great big corporate profiteering villains who are other than you and I. But all of it.

Okay? I have very little or no quarrel with anything you say, as far as it goes. I don't frankly think that Zyprexa, per se, is a good or adequate treatment for psychosis. Even dangerous side effects aside, it's a pretty punishing drug in cognitive terms. However, while psychosis isn't always life-destroying, it can be. Responsibly and sensitively prescribed Zyprexa could only ever be a lesser-of-two-evils response to it when it was, at best. And I'm under no illusions about that whatsoever. But neither am I under any illusions about there being any real alternatives for some (and not a small number) of people who want to stay alive in the least hellish state that's realistically achievable. Because they don't have any.

That's all. It's not like I'm happy about it. It's just how it is.


More shortly.

[compared2what?]

[color=#0000FF]With all respect, you haven't really established a thing about the "real properties and dimensions" the problem has [at least, not in this discussion].

Yes. I have.

I think it's correct, true, fair and accurate to say that Big Pharma is capable of lying, cheating and killing to make a buck, and that the FDA doesn't give enough of a fuck about that to put any institutional obstacles in their way.

This?

They are not only "capable of lying." That's a mischaracterization. Given their expressed motivations and known conduct, a fairer conclusion is that Big Pharma will lie when it can reasonably be expected that they will either get away with, or take a small enough hit relative to the gain in profit to warrant the exposure of the lie. Where lying will not work, elision, downplaying, weasel-wording and the like do fine, as will efforts to stack the regulatory and legislative decks in their favor. And of course, these strategies aren't mutually exclusive.

We shouldn't forget: Pharmaceutical companies are marketing companies, basically. You understand that, right? They market more than they do anything else, certainly more than they research and develop. It's not close.

Second, the regulatory system is captured, by and large. When past industry figures are the ones doing the regulating [hardly a unique occurrence], it's a safe bet those obstacles aren't going to be all that great. One teeny example from wiki:

The United States Food and Drug Administration has also been accused of acting in the interests of the agricultural, food and pharmaceutical industries (and supporting monopolies) at the expense of consumer health interests. Monsanto's growth hormone, rBGH, which has been linked to cancer in cows and humans,[42] has been banned in numerous countries, but is unlabeled and legal in the United States.[43] Margaret Miller, a former chemical laboratory supervisor at Monsanto,[44] wrote a scientific report that was to be submitted to the FDA to obtain approval of the drug. Shortly before the report was submitted, Miller quit Monsanto to take a job at the FDA, where her first job was to approve the report she had just written while employed at Monsanto.[43][45] Michael R. Taylor, the FDA's deputy commissioner for policy, and a former staff lawyer at Monsanto, where he worked on rBGH legal issues, wrote the FDA's labeling guidelines for rBGH.[42]

^^

Selective and unnecessarily narrow focus exclusively emphasizing material that confirms your premise, not argument, imo. I agree with you about what I said I agreed with you about, and some other stuff too. But I'm afraid I can't sign the full loyalty oath. (That's a joke, btw.) And I very much hope you respect me anyway, as I do you.

[compared2what?]

I have a few bones to pick here, out of an interest in precision.

Pharma is evil, corrupt, dishonest, criminal and dangerous.

I'm not sure I am understanding that this is indeed your belief, from what might be considered a fair bit of ambiguity on your part earlier in the thread. I undertand the conversation gets heated and we don't always write exactly what we mean, but in an effort to clear things up now, it does not appear to me that this was your message before. And, as far as I'm concerned, it is such a a blanket statement that it should not be accepted in its entirety without serious qualification, anyway.

That is my belief, although it's not the whole of my belief. And it's certainly not the cornerstone of my belief. Because, as a general proposition, it just doesn't get you anywhere and isn't very informative. I mean, of what major institutional power could the same not be truly said?

But as far as it goes, yes, I think that's true and meaningful. It's just not news one can use.

* There's no guarantee that drug trials ever adhere to acceptable scientific standards and abundant proof that they regularly don't, which is a fucking outrage and crime, given that issues of life and death are at stake.

As someone in the business, somewhat tangentially but still close enough to observe what goes on regularly, I would say that the standards are taken very seriously and adhered to much of the time. The "abundant proof" consists of a few high-profile egregious cases along with meta-analysis that documents the usual failings of all scientific research, namely publication bias that results from a reward system that penalizes null results, as well as routine conflicts-of-interest which, at least from an institutional perspective, are taken seriously. I'm not saying the business is pristine - far from it - but if we are being precise then it stands to reason that we need to take pains not to oversimplify and demonize.

As far as I'm concerned, the core issues are (1) uneven access to care (which we really do all agree on); and (2) patient autonomy, which is the one issue that I am noticing keeps getting swept under the rug. It may be my own hobby horse, but there it is.

I take your point. But I'm comfortable with the phrasing as it stands, since it was considered. There's no guarantee.

[Hammer of Los]

...

I studied the works of R D Laing and other psychiatrists of similar bent when I was quite young.

I promise you at the time I had never even heard of Scientology.

...

[compared2what?]

...

I studied the works of R D Laing and other psychiatrists of similar bent when I was quite young.

I promise you at the time I had never even heard of Scientology.

...

Same here!

My interest in psychiatry/psychology/mental-"disorder" stuff is almost lifelong and predates my awareness of Co$ by many, many years. I mean, I've always had my own views rather than a version of somebody else's, that's just my contrarian little way. But fwiw, some of that stuff -- The Myth of Mental Illness, in particular -- was (and still is) important and influential to me, despite some degree of personal disagreement with it.

And I didn't have any very strong objections to any of it until I read Talking Back to Prozac (by the Breggins), which I did in a state of complete and total unawareness of so much as the possibility that it was Co$-linked, as well as a state of complete and total ignorance of what such links suggested.

IOW: I didn't know of the relationship and it wouldn't have meant anything to me at the time even if I had. Nevertheless. I didn't just dislike the book, or vigorously take issue with it. I recognized it as a hateful and dishonest piece of fundamentalist demogoguery that might or might not turn out to be a serious menace to the life, liberty and happiness of well-intentioned people everywhere. But not for lack of trying.

There's a pretty robust tradition for that kind of thing in the United States. So it didn't particularly strike me as needing any explaining.

Anyway. Breggin's the only example that I can point to with complete confidence and say: "My opinion of this man's work is in no way influenced by any factors that are external to it whatsoever. I just oppose it on its own dubious merits." But there might have been others. I just happen to be able to date the formation of my views on Breggin relative to the evolution of my understanding of Co$ without fear of inadvertent revisionism in my own favor.

Which is not to say that I mightn't sometimes be prone to confirmation bias in this arena or any other. I'm human, after all.

ON EDIT: It's also not to say I'm right, btw. Just that I'm consistent.

[eyeno]

Just saw this pop up on the radar today. The methods used in this study don't seem like they would reveal accurate results.


And this part....Unsolicited adverse effects


Parts in bold done by original author.

Premature Babies Used As Lab Rats By GlaxoSmithKline



How do these pharmacy corporations expect to get away with it?

While reading the results of a vaccination trial on premature babies funded by GlaxoSmithKline, I noticed something was not quite right.

The trial, whilst sickening in itself, was testing out the rotavirus vaccine on a group of 988 premature babies ranging between 27 weeks and 36 weeks.

The paper reporting the trial was published on the ‘Pediatric SuperSite’ and was entitled ‘Human rotavirus immunogenic, well-tolerated for preterm infants’ by Felix Omenaca MD. PhD, and colleagues (1) The paper stated the following:

“The researchers grouped preterm infants by ages — infants born at gestational ages 27 to 30 weeks and those born at 30 to 36 weeks. They administered rotavirus vaccine (RIX4414, GlaxoSmithKline) in two doses to 658 preterm infants, and 330 received a placebo along with routine vaccinations, including diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type B and poliovirus. Infants from France and Spain also received Streptococcus pneumoniae concomitantly; infants from Portugal and Spain also received Neisseria meningitides.

The researchers then asked parents/guardians to report adverse effects, and they noted no statistically significant difference in the reporting of severe adverse reactions in the vaccine or placebo group (5.1% and 6.2%, respectively). Unsolicited adverse effects, which included fever of more than 39.5·C, six or more bouts of diarrhea per day, three or more episodes of vomiting per day, appetite loss and irritability, were reported in 29.3% of preterm infants in the vaccine group and 40.7% in the placebo group. (own emphasis)

The problems I see are as follows:

All the infants were given multiple vaccinations, therefore, there was no control group.
Of a group of 988 children, approx 2/3 were given the vaccine for rotavirus and 1/3 were given the placebo, then the researchers compared the results like for like. This cannot be done because one group is significantly larger than the other.

Because all of the infants received multiple vaccinations it is impossible to tell which vaccine if any caused the side effects.

I decided to examine the exact figures in greater detail.

The total of infants given all the vaccines including the rotavirus vaccine was 658 which equal 66.6% of the total number of babies being tested.

The total of infants given all the vaccines except the rotavirus vaccine was 330 which equal 33.3% of the total number of babies being tested.

Severe Reactions

In the group receiving the rotavirus vaccine 5.1% of the infants had a severe reaction; this was a total of 33 children.

In the group receiving the placebo 6.2% of the infants had a severe reaction; this was a total of 20 children.

Less Severe Reactions

Now let us look at what the researchers call ‘unsolicited adverse effects’.

The researchers say that these effects included fever of more than 39.5·C, six or more bouts of diarrhea per day, three or more episodes of vomiting per day, appetite loss and irritability.

(TAP - My baby son was vaccinated at The Asian Hopsital & Medical Center without permission at birth with GSK's Engerix-B. He suffered two days of drowsiness and loss of appetite. As these were his first two days of life, it was extremely stressful for us the parents.)

In the group receiving the rotavirus vaccine 29.3% of the infants had an unsolicited adverse effect which is a total of 192 children.

In the group receiving the placebo 40.7% of the infants had an unsolicited adverse effect which is a total of 134 children

Presuming that the children in the severe group were different to the children in the unsolicited group, this means that a total of 225 children of the 688 who received all of the vaccines including the rotavirus vaccine had an adverse reaction.

(Figures checked on Google)

This amounts to a massive number of premature babies suffering from adverse reactions and yet despite this the researchers, reported that ‘because of the higher risk that human rotavirus poses to preterm infants, the study supports this vaccine’s use in those older than 27 weeks who are “medically stable at the time of or after discharge from the neonatal unit’.

These are the vaccination trials that we the public rely on to test our vaccinations before use. Does anyone at the WHO, the FDA or the CDC ever even look at these studies in detail or do they just read the concluding paragraph?

This study was flawed from the beginning due to the number of variables affecting the sample groups being tested. The researchers did disclose the age of the children and the other vaccines that could affect the results, however; they did not disclose any other conflicting variables. These variables may include cultural, social and economical backgrounds, weight and medical histories including any drugs that the babies were already being treated with.

Just by reading this study through anyone with an ounce of sense can see that it is weighted in favor of the researchers.

This was a trial on premature infants for goodness sake!

To use these small vulnerable babies as little more than lab rats is bad enough but to then falsify the results to get the vaccines sanctioned to give to all premature babies is positively criminal.

Not only that, but this was a trial of a GlaxoSmithKline product, funded by GlaxoSmithKline with the majority of the researchers researching the product actually having financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline. Unbelievable!!!!

The disclaimer at the end of the report read.

“Disclosure: A number of researchers reported financial ties to GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals, which funded the study”.

A couple of days ago I wrote an article about a prem baby from Belgium (2) who died after receiving a cocktail of vaccines including the rotavirus vaccine. Is it any wonder that this baby lost her life when parents have to rely on studies like this?

Christina England vacutruth.com

TAP - Filipino friends of ours had a premature boy who was treated like a vaccine pin cushion. The parents had n o idea of the risks. The baby boy survived but is now extremely sensitive with asthma, food intolerance, a hernia and is sick all the time. It's not nice to look at his photo.
The Tap Blog is a collective of like-minded researchers and writers who've joined forces to distribute information and voice opinions avoided by the world's media.

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1665/740 ... Kline.html

[slomo]

^^^^ Multiple vaccinations in the control group does not bother me, as it falls under the "standard of care" rubrik. In fact, it would bother me more (from a scientific perspective) if the control group had not had routine vaccinations. The important point, from a study design perspective, is that the treatment group isolated the vaccine under study.

As for the adverse effects rates translated into absolute numbers, this is a problem only in that vaccination is essentially a mandated procedure on virtually the entire population (although, to be fair, premature infants will fare worse than the general population in most measures). The rates are "comparable" to other treatments, in the sense that the are single-digit percentages, but the real issue is the lack of autonomy.

[Grizzly]

http://www.naturalnews.com/022743.html

Chemically-Induced Suicide: 80 Percent of Suicide Victims Took Antidepressant Drugs

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/022743.html#ixzz1kQya2q7T

Originally published February 28 2008
Chemically-Induced Suicide: 80 Percent of Suicide Victims Took Antidepressant Drugs
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) A Swedish writer has accused the National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) of covering up evidence suggesting a connection between psychiatric drugs and suicide. Under a recent law, Swedish health-care providers must fill out reports on all suicides committed by patients under their care or within four weeks of a health care visit. The reports are then sent to the NBHW, which compiles and analyzes them.

Recently, the NBHW released the first report analyzing the 367 suicides recorded in 2006. "Not a single word is written about the most compelling fact: Well over 80 percent of persons killing themselves were treated with psychiatric drugs," Janne Larson writes.

According to data received via a Freedom of Information Act request, more than 80 percent of the 367 suicides had been receiving psychiatric medications. More than half of these were receiving antidepressants, while more than 60 percent were receiving either antidepressants or antipsychotics. There is no mention of this either in the NBHW paper or in major Swedish media reports about the health care suicides.

Why the truth won't be reported in the mainstream media
"It was contrary to the best interests of Big Pharma and biological psychiatrists" to expose the information, Larson writes. "It blew the myths of antidepressants and neuroleptics [antipsychotics] as suicide protecting drugs to pieces. It would also have hurt the career of many medical journalists to take up this subject; journalists who for years have made their living by writing marketing articles about new antidepressant drugs."

These statements are quite true. The conspiracy of silence between Big Pharma and the mainstream media is now so strong that accurate news about the dangers of psychiatric drugs is rarely reported. As we recently saw in the death of Heath Ledger, the mainstream media is quick to blame the victim, but slow to realize that the real cause of these behavioral problems rests with the chemicals that alter brain function (and therefore alter behavior).

Evidence has emerged that a class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) actually increases the risk of suicide in those who take them. While such claims have been hotly disputed by the pharmaceutical industry and many psychiatrists, experimental, epidemiological and case study evidence continues to emerge that reinforces such a link. The evidence suggests that those taking SSRIs are approximately twice as likely to commit suicide as those not taking such medications. This risk increase appears to be independent of the specific diagnosis or other underlying health factors.

Even worse, recent research published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Medicine (see http://medicine.plosjournals.org/pe...) reveals that antidepressant drugs don't work any better than placebo at reducing depression. This study looked at all the clinical trials conducted on SSRIs, not just the ones selected by drug companies for publication. It reveals that SSRI drug manufacturers committed scientific fraud in censoring studies that did not show positive results. Now, the whole world knows that the disease mongering and hype behind antidepressant drugs was based on pure scientific fraud.

Links between SSRIs and suicide
The link between SSRI use and suicide in youths has been firmly established enough that the United States and United Kingdom have licensed only one such drug (fluoxetine, marketed under the brand name Prozac) for use by those under the age of 18. In the United Kingdom, off-label use by children is blatantly illegal. In the United States, the FDA requires a "black box" warning that SSRIs may increase the risk of suicide in those under the age of 18, but that warning is routinely ignored, and hundreds of millions of doses of Prozac have been taken by children and teens.

A "black box" warning is the most severe warning the FDA can issue without withdrawing a product from the market. In December 2006, an FDA advisory panel recommended increasing the age on the SSRI black box warning to 25 years of age. In reality, the black box warning is a way for the FDA to allow dangerous drugs to remain on the market: It gives them an excuse to say, "We warned you!"

The dangers of Prozac
Prozac has been found to increase the risk of aggressive and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. When the drug was first submitted to the FDA for approval in 1985, the agency's then-chief safety investigator, Richard Kapit, suggested that the drug bear a "labeling warning [for] the physician that such signs and symptoms of depression may be exacerbated by this drug." In 2004, the FDA finally added the labeling requirement.

Antipsychotics may also increase suicide risk by inducing a condition known as akathisia — a subjective, often-misdiagnosed feeling of inner restlessness that can range from mild anxiety to a feeling of overwhelming doom. Akathisia can also be induced by certain SSRIs, including Prozac and Paxil. A 2006 study published in PLoS Medicine concluded that akathisia induced by antipsychotic use is significantly correlated with suicide, and that the condition appeared to be overwhelmingly more likely in patients taking SSRIs than in those taking a placebo, with 10 times as many patients on SSRIs exhibiting symptoms severe enough that investigators were forced to pull them from the study.

Yet Larson alleges that the Swedish government has failed to investigate any potential link between SSRIs or antipsychotics and suicide. The investigation form that the government sends to local healthcare providers to fill out after a suicide does not contain any questions about drug treatment.

According to Larson, a truly objective investigation would have to look at whether the patients exhibited symptoms that could be attributed to akathisia (which is nearly always a drug side effect) and whether suicide was preceded by an increase or abrupt drop in drug dosage.

"[NBHW] claimed: 'Every investigated suicide where one can see flaws that can be taken care of, can contribute to the prevention of further suicides,'" Larson writes. "Yet no investigation at all was done in the suicide-inducing effect of antidepressants and neuroleptics."

Suicides and violent behavior
It is important to note that nearly every school shooting that has happened in the United States over the last decade has been conducted by young males who were taking antidepressant drugs. The drugs not only cause suicidal behavior, they also seem to promote extreme violence towards other individuals. In most school shooting cases, the young men committing the violence also committed suicide after killing classmates and teachers. These are classic signs of antidepressant use.

Dr. Fred Baughman (www.ADHDfraud.org) has spoken extensively about the link between antidepressants and violent behavior, and has accused the drug companies of lying to the public about depression in order to sell more antidepressant drugs. His most recent article is published at OpEdNews: http://www.opednews.com/articles/op...

See more NaturalNews articles on antidepressant drugs at: http://www.naturalnews.com/antidepr...

For whatever its worth...

[Elvis]

80 Percent of Suicide Victims Took Antidepressant Drugs

Just another anecdote, but interesting:

A longtime friend, a neighbor across the hall, shot himself a few years ago. He had recently started an antidepressant regime, which I suspect of sending him over the edge. When the police came, they asked me if he had been 'into drugs'; he wasn't, but I did mention the antidepressants. At the word "antidepressant," the interview was over: "Ohhhhhhh, okay," the policeman said, already turning around with a 'say no more' wave of his arm. "Those things make people do some weird things."

I took this as significant, coming from a guy who has doubtless investigated many such deaths.

[Iamwhomiam]

slomo wrote:
I have a few bones to pick here, out of an interest in precision.

compared2what? wrote:
Pharma is evil, corrupt, dishonest, criminal and dangerous.

<snip>
And, as far as I'm concerned, it is such a a blanket statement that it should not be accepted in its entirety without serious qualification, anyway.
<snip>
As someone in the business, somewhat tangentially but still close enough to observe what goes on regularly, I would say that the standards are taken very seriously and adhered to much of the time. The "abundant proof" consists of a few high-profile egregious cases along with meta-analysis that documents the usual failings of all scientific research, namely publication bias that results from a reward system that penalizes null results, as well as routine conflicts-of-interest which, at least from an institutional perspective, are taken seriously. I'm not saying the business is pristine - far from it - but if we are being precise then it stands to reason that we need to take pains not to oversimplify and demonize.

slomo, with all due respect, "much of time time" is simply inadequate, especially in this relation to pharmacological research and human testing, perhaps even grossly so.

Unless people like you, researchers on the inside come forward and reveal those failings, we on the outside pay the price and remain oblivious until tragedy strikes. And you seem to have excluded the true objects of your research, the human patient. But it is fair for you to report from your limited area of experience behind the scene, in the lab.

And to say that c2w? has oversimplified and demonized an industry that kills, maims and institutionalizes many people while seeking a better solution is unfair. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and many, not a few, well documented "high-profile egregious cases." Of course there could be many more well known egregious cases if only the big pharma didn't demand non-disclosure in their settlement with those they've harmed or their survivors. After all, their primary purpose is not healing patients, but profiting from maintaining them on their drug.

As far as the practice of medicine goes, and I speak only from my own experience, it's atrocious. Yes, there are good doctors, but the profession (I use that word reluctantly) too often defends bad doctors rather than cast a cloud on their profession by ousting them.

And let's not forget or a moment that medicine is a "practice." Some do practice better than others. And some lie and some cheat.

I've had horrible experiences with most of the doctors I've dealt with throughout my life. Having some understanding of medicines and proper treatment of patients, (I studied to become a nurse), makes dealing with uniformed doctors even scarier than it does for one from the general population.

Recently, in December, a friend suffered a series of three unrelated ischemic strokes and wasn't administered heparin for 19 days into his hospitalization, after he had suffered yet another. Because his epiglottis and larnyx had been paralyzed his ability to swallow and his speech was negatively affected. He was given a tracheotomy and put on a ventilator and was receiving nutrition intravenously and via a naso-gastric tube. Years before he had undergone a Whipple surgical procedure and later developed diabetes and afterward also suffered from several hernias. Because of this his doctors at first decided it was best to stay away from compounding his troubles by surgically implanting a feeding tube where his duodenum had been and stick wtih the NG tube. But for some odd reason after his last stroke they decided to go there. During the procedure they hadn't noticed they had ruptured his intestine until the next day when his became septic with a raging fever. This is a teaching hospital and a local trauma center. Needless to say, he won't need to worry about his kids being provided for after his passing.

Another suit dealing with the maltreatment of another patient treated by this institution was just settled for a few million. He had a non-cancerous brain tumor removed and was released with a high temperature suffering from pneumonia.

Questionably, my own worst experience was when I broke my back. I suffered a double spondylolitshesis with a 40% anterior shift and three crushed discs. I was never told I had severely broken my back and he released me to return to my job as a structural steel ironworker. It was only some three years later that the insurance company's doctor explained that I had not strained my back when I was injured, as I had believed.

Oddly enough, During the time of the Reagan administration I also had tree ribs broken at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, when I entered the assembly hall through the wrong door with an invited guest. ( to be fair, I did have a hoard of angry elderly folks with me, all wearing surgical masks and waving their four-footed canes in the air. Being an organizer, we were there to protest the AMA's support of Reagan's budget. We had already mobbed the main entrance when I had the bright idea of finding an alternative entrance. I did. It was a side entrance down in front, right by the physician studded dais. I got nailed; straight-armed by a line-backer security guard)

Lots of doctors suck, but there are a few good doctors. If you ever come across a good one, please let me know.