Clinical Trials and Scientific Studies - How Credible Are They?

From Organic Lifestyle Magazine online
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Pill Head

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2009/11/23/PillHead/?utm_source=mondayheadlines&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=231109

'Pill Head'
Addiction to painkillers is rampant. Part of the cure is this honest, informative true story.
By Bess Lovejoy, 23 Nov 2009, TheTyee.ca

The more you take, the more you want.

Pill Head: The Secret Life of a Painkiller Addict
Joshua Lyon
Hyperion (2009)
Joshua Lyon, a Brooklyn-based journalist, first bought prescription painkillers over the internet in 2003 as part of an assignment for Jane magazine. Like everyone else at the time, his inbox was flooded with offers of "Cheap Rx!" (many from Canadian pharmacies), and he was curious to know just how easy ordering these drugs could be. Pretty easy, it turned out. Within 48 hours of ordering a bottle each of Vicodin, Xanax, and Valium from the internet, Lyon was staring at the bottles on his desk. A brief, fib-filled phone conversation with the website's "doctor" served as his only screening.

While Lyon promised his editor that he would flush the contents of his new orange bottles down the toilet after finishing his assignment, curiosity and an anti-authoritarian streak led him to try a few instead. And that was it -- he was in love. After downing his first three Vicodin, Lyon decided that "this is what I've been waiting for my whole life." He describes the pills as curing depression, social anxiety and physical pain all at once, producing a feeling akin to lounging in a sauna, or a constant, low-grade orgasm.

Less stigma, same risks

Lyon wasn't alone in his newfound chemical romance. Statistics show that about 33 million Americans have used prescription painkillers like Vicodin, Oxycontin, and Percocet non-medically, while Canadian research estimates that between 300,000 to 900,000 in the general population are abusing prescription opioids (as much as three per cent). Research has yet to uncover the full picture in Canada, although Professor Benedikt Fischer of Simon Fraser University's faculty of health sciences recently got a multimillion-dollar grant to study the problem.

The Secret Life of Psychiatrists

From the article:

American mental-health practitioners need psychological help, a new report says, and they are not getting nearly enough of it. An amazingly prescient article published a few years ago in the U.S. journal Psychology Today and recently reprinted on the Huffington Post lends clinical credence to the commonly held assumption that mental-health workers (and by that the essay's author, Robert Epstein, means psychotherapists, psychologists and psychiatrists like Hasan) have historically suffered from relatively high rates of mental illness. As Epstein, a high-profile clinical psychologist himself, put it, “mental-health professionals are, in general, a fairly crazy lot – at least as troubled as the general population … The problem is that mental-health professionals do a poor job of monitoring their own mental-health problems and those of their colleagues. In fact, the main responsibility for spotting an impaired therapist seems to fall on the patient, who presumably has his or her own problems to deal with.”

Which sounds a bit nuts, doesn't it?

The possible reasons for high rates of mental illness among mental-health professionals are thought to be twofold.

Firstly, people with a history of psychological problems seem more attracted to the profession. There is ample published research back this up. According to Epstein, an American Psychiatric Association study reported that “physicians with affective disorders tend to select psychiatry as a specialty.” And a 1993 study found therapists reported higher rates of family dysfunction, parental alcoholism, sexual and physical abuse and parental death or psychiatric hospitalization than their peers in other professions. Even Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund and a respected shrink in her own right, once admitted that her “most sophisticated defence mechanism in life was becoming a psychotherapist.”

The second reason is the nature of the job itself. Most therapists are continually exposed to disturbed, depressed and often violent and/or suicidal individuals. Indeed, it is their duty to interact with them. As Epstein put it, “virtually all mental health-professionals agree that the profession is inherently hazardous. It takes superhuman strength for most people just to listen to a neighbour moan about his lousy marriage for 15 minutes.”

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See the scale of your cells

A wondrous online toy from the University of Utah.
More here.

Prozacville

Cartoons. Go see!
http://www.prozacville.co.uk/

At top medical schools, more than half the profs have drug industry ties

By Jacob Goldstein

"Sometimes it seems like everybody has financial ties to the drug or device industry. As it turns out, it’s only a little more than half of everybody.

A survey conducted in 2006-07 and published this week in the journal Health Affairs found that 53% of academic research faculty in the life sciences at top schools reported financial ties to industry.

About a third of the respondents said they had served as consultants, nearly a quarter said they had been paid speakers and 20% said they had received research funding from industry. That last figure is down from 28% of researchers who said they received research funding from industry in a similar survey conducted in 1995.

The authors suggest a number of possible causes of the drop in researchers who said they got industry funding for research, including a big increase in NIH research funding since 1995 and more scrutiny of academic-industry ties.

(Speaking of that scrutiny, you might want to take a look at a story in this morning’s New York Times that describes how the big health-care bills in both houses of Congress would require industry to report payments to doctors.)"



Read more at WSJ Blog

The Facts against Compulsory Vaccination

Milwaukee Health Board Official Tells How He Used Fright and Pressure to Have People Vaccinated.


"Since people cannot be vaccinated against their will, the biggest job of a health department has always been, and always will be, to persuade the unprotected people to get vaccinated. This we attempted to do in three ways: first by education; second, by fright; and third, by pressure.

We dislike very much to mention fright and pressure, yet they accomplish more than education, because they work faster than education, which is normally a slow process.

During the months of March and April we tried education, and vaccinated only 62,000. During May we made use of fright and pressure, and vaccinated 223,000 people.

Our educational program consisted of warnings in the daily papers, small-pox posters on the streets, in stores and factories, special small-pox bulletins for all large places of employment, and special letters to all large employers from the health department and the association of commerce, calling their attention to a threatening small-pox epidemic. The radio was also made use of in this work.

As the conditions grew worse, we felt justified in using stronger measures. We had some good pictures taken of patients suffering from the confluent type of small-pox, and had posters, showing these pictures, distributed all over the city. The moving picture theatres cooperated at this time by issuing warnings on the screen.

The newspapers published daily the names and addresses of people dying from small-pox. A second letter was sent to all factories, stores, and other places of business, informing them of a rapidly approaching small-pox epidemic, and advising them to have their employees vaccinated immediately, and thereby prevent a serious financial loss to the city, which might occur if a real epidemic developed.

At this time the department was vaccinating thousands of people daily, but there were still too many who could neither be educated nor frightened into vaccination. Cases and deaths each amounted to a considerable number, and we now felt justified in using all of the power a health officer has, and if that was not enough, to get more.

We sent out a third letter to all employers requesting them to have all of their employees vaccinated and at the same time informing them that if a small-pox case developed in their place of employment in the future we would consider their place of business a menace to the health of the community and very likely place the entire establishment under quarantine until it could be cleaned up and made safe for the public. Putting this responsibility on the employer drove in thousands of anti-vaccinationists who could better afford to get vaccinated than lose their jobs. All employees co-operated very bravely with this last request, although in a few instances it was necessary to lay off old, reliable and valuable employees."

- Declaration by Dr. John P. Koehler, Commissioner of Health of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in an article in The Wisconsin Medical Journal, November, 1925.

From The Facts against Compulsory Vaccination, a book by H.B. Anderson
Book reviewed by a party with clear conflicts of interest here