Deepak Chopra on Michael Jackson and Enabling Doctors

A list of the cocktail of drugs Michael Jackson was taking when he died can be seen here.

Dr. Deepak Chopra was a friend of Jackson's. He writes about Jackson's death on his blog at The Huffington Post.

"The public's attention span is short, but widespread awareness is the first step. The real target audience are the local licensing boards and peer review committees who handle medical practice. The culture of "just say yes" when a celebrity shows up in a doctor's office needs to be condemned. This condemnation needs to be followed up with serious consequences for enabling physicians. If they recklessly addict a patient, severe repercussions should follow. If they themselves are addicted, complete abstinence must be achieved before they are allowed to return to medical practice, and random drug testing should be required by all states. Computerized medical histories should be instituted, so that we know precisely how many prescriptions are being written by each doctor and filled by each patient. With a centralized database, celebrities won't be able to pull off the trick of fooling dozens doctors and pharmacists all over town. And we need to do a better job educating physicians about the nuances and difficulties of treating patients such as these.

These steps are a beginning. Realistically, celebrities will always be first in line in gaining easy access to drugs. They have the means, the excuses, the money, and the opportunity. But at the very least the culture of enabling physicians must be branded as shameful. The same image that fools the public has eroded medical ethics. The abuse of prescription medication is becoming an alarming problem in this country, It's not fun to take drugs, it is serious business as is our charge to care for patients, celebrity or not. Doctors that enable celebrities must be brought to justice or else we will continue to witness shattered lives and sudden death."

Link
Chopra says Jackson's death due to drugs More

Psychiatric Treatment: A Risk Factor for Obesity?

Get the stats and facts from the Canadian Pediatric Association (PDF)
https://www.cps.ca/english/Media/NewsReleases/PCHFebruary02/ArticlePsychiatricObesity.pdf or Link

Apparently increased or decreased head size, weight gain and male breast enlargement are pretty common with all antipsychotic medications, and the results can be permanent. Link


Gynecomastia - Man Boobs -

More Americans are taking drugs for mental illness than ever before, reports Reuters.
Why not try food for mood and mental health instead?
An article from the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients outlines vitamin treatment of psychosis (schizophrenia) here.

Global Alzheimer's Disease Charter

"We are facing a public health and social care emergency and immediate action is needed!

Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia and accounts for 60-70% of all cases. Alzheimer's disease and other dementias are progressive, degenerative illnesses that attack the brain. They affect people's abilities, impacting on all aspects of their life and upon others in their lives, particularly those who care for them day by day.

Every year, 4.6 million new cases of dementia are reported worldwide: One new case every seven seconds. By 2050, it is projected that there will be 100 million people with dementia in the world. No country is adequately prepared to deal with a crisis of this magnitude.

Lack of awareness and understanding has resulted in insufficient resources to address this crisis. Worldwide, attention to this rapidly growing problem is so small that most of those affected continue to suffer without help, or hope. This must change! The quality of life of people with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias can be transformed. Too often, they, their families and carers lack the support that they need and deserve.

We, the members of Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI), representing 77 associations around the world, urgently call upon all governments and stakeholders to act now."

Link to Petition

We couldn't agree more... but think that this unhappy state - of DEFICIENCY DISEASES - has arisen due to bad nutrition. Information about maintenance of brain health through proper eating and supplementation is important in prevention of Alzheimer's and the dementias, should begin in childhood and last all your life. A society that knows and cares more about what goes into pet food than human food - and lets its elders eat dog food - should be ashamed of itself.

WHAT REALLY CAUSES ALZHEIMER'S? We think Harold Foster has the answer and you can read his book free, here.

Bentall: Doctoring the Mind

"See a psychiatrist? Are you mad?"

'Bentall's thesis is that, for all the apparent advances in understanding psychiatric disorders, psychiatric treatment has done little to improve human welfare, because the scientific research which has led to the favouring of mind-altering drugs is, as he puts it, "fatally flawed". He cites some startling evidence from the World Health Organisation that suggests patients suffering psychotic episodes in developing countries recover "better" than those from the industrialised world and the aim of the book is broadly to suggest why this might be so.'

Link

This is the second of two articles this week on the controversial Dr. Bentall. The first, we posted here -
Pharmaceuticals Anonymous: "Psychiatric diagnoses are less reliable than star signs"

Humor: The Velveeta Rabbit

This makes us laugh, and we hope you will like it, too. Link
The original story is
here.

"Psychiatric diagnoses are less reliable than star signs"

'The psychologist Richard Bentall says that psychiatrists dish out drugs but ignore the value of good relationships

Ed Halliwell - The Times Online

Complain to your doctor about a mental health problem and you will probably leave the surgery with a prescription for drugs, despite increasing doubts about their effectiveness and fears about side-effects. The prevailing wisdom is that psychiatric disorders are genetically based brain diseases, biological abnormalities that can be controlled with medication. Every year, doctors in England dole out 31 million prescriptions for antidepressants alone.

It is a state of affairs that makes Richard Bentall furious. In 2004, Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Bangor, wrote Madness Explained, in which he argued that hearing voices, hallucinations and other symptoms of “severe” mental illness are just exaggerations of quirks experienced by us all. That won him the British Psychological Book Of The Year award. Now, in Doctoring The Mind: Why Psychiatric Treatments Fail, he criticises mental health services, and psychiatry in particular.

Doctoring the Mind paints a stark picture of a mental health system riddled with corruption and incompetence, in which shrinks live it up on pharmaceutical company cash while patients are disrespected, dehumanised and drugged to the eyeballs. Like the legendary “anti-psychiatrist” R.D. Laing before him, Bentall believes that people with mental health problems need understanding, support and respect. Unlike Laing, he offers evidence to back his claims, declaring himself a “rational anti-psychiatrist”.

“I am committed to the scientific world-view,” the 53-year-old says, his urgent voice rising above the rush-hour clatter of the station café in which we meet. “But the evidence doesn’t support the hardline biomedical view behind most psychiatric practice.” He takes a sip of coffee, then continues. “More alarmingly, the treatments based on it are not very effective. Outcomes for psychiatric disorders are no better than in the Victorian period.”'

Continues here.

Also see The Thud Experiment


The 29 medical causes of schizophrenia - infection, intoxication, deficiency or imbalance - are explained here.

Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple

Taking Down the Corporate Food System Is Simple
By Joel Salatin, Public Affairs Books
Posted on June 20, 2009,
http://www.alternet.org/story/140477/

Excerpted by permission from "Declare Your Independence" by Joel Salatin, part of the book Food, Inc., available now from PublicAffairs. Copyright 2009.

Perhaps the most empowering concept in any paradigm-challenging movement is simply opting out. The opt-out strategy can humble the mightiest forces because it declares to one and all, "You do not control me."

The time has come for people who are ready to challenge the paradigm of factory-produced food and to return to a more natural, wholesome and sustainable way of eating (and living) to make that declaration to the powers that be, in business and government, that established the existing system and continue to prop it up. It's time to opt out and simply start eating better -- right here, right now.

Impractical? Idealistic? Utopian? Not really. As I'll explain, it's actually the most realistic and effective approach to transforming a system that is slowly but surely killing us.

What happened to food?
... snip...
The unprecedented variety of bar-coded packages in today's supermarket really does not mean that our generation enjoys better food options than our predecessors. These packages, by and large, having passed through the food-inspection fraternity, the industrial food fraternity and the lethargic cheap-food-purchasing consumer fraternity, represent an incredibly narrow choice.
Link

Author Joel Salatin at his farm

Cause of CFS/ME Found - Hydrogen sulphite

As with ulcers and Helicobactor pylori, an illness-causing culprit
in CFS can be bacteria that produce hydrogen sulphite - dangerous SOUR GAS - in the gut. Sour gas can weaken and kill and is much feared even by the strongest workers in industry.
Probiotics and Bismuth - in Pepto-Bismol - can help.
More at the excellent blog of Dana Herbert, food and health activist.

FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers

Image: Klimt, Mother and Child


Mothers' Act Looms as Drug Industry Scam

FDA Throws Lifeline to Antipsychotic Pushers

By EVELYN PRINGLE

"On June 11, 2009, FDA News reported that AstraZeneca’s Seroquel, Pfizer’s Geodon and Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa atypical antipsychotics "won an FDA advisory panel’s recommendations for approval to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in pediatric and adolescent patients."

"The FDA's expanded marketing approval process for antipsychotics, highly toxic drugs, is unaffected by evidence uncovered by the US Justice Department showing that the studies submitted by drug manufacturers were often flawed, if not fraudulent," says Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, in a June 8, 2009 infomail alert.

"Rather than focus on protecting children's safety, FDA officials are doing their utmost to legitimize irresponsible, off-label prescribing of exceedingly toxic antipsychotics for children--thereby ensuring that far greater numbers of children will be victimized and die," according to Sharav.

A recent report by the consulting firm Decision Resources found antipsychotics makers spent $993,000,000 in 2006, to promote these drugs to doctors and patients, she reports. In 2008, at more than $14 billion, antipsychotic revenues topped all other classes of drugs in the US, even cholesterol and diabetes medications."

Link

P.A. Comments:
There are 29 known causes of schizophrenia, and most are easily corrected with elimination or supplementation - not antipsychotics. The sooner the public understands this, the better.
http://www.alternativementalhealth.com/articles/causesofschizophrenia.htm

Former drug rep: Pharma not in business of healing

With thanks to - http://www.myspace.com/psychtruth

Ex-Pharma Sales Reps Speaks Out - Pharma Not in Business of Health, Healing, Cures, Wellness.

Gwen Olsen spent fifteen years as a pharmaceutical sales rep working for such healthcare giants as Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Abbott Laboratories. She enjoyed a successful, fast-paced career until several conscious-altering experiences began awakening her to the dangers lurking in every American medicine cabinet. Her most poignant lessons, however, came as both victim and survivor of life-threatening adverse drug reactions. After leaving pharmaceutical sales in 2000, Gwen worked in the natural foods industry first as an Account Manager for Nature's Way, and then as a Regional Sales Manager for Gaia Herbs. She is currently a writer, speaker, and natural health consultant.

The United States health care system is killing Americans at an alarming rate, even though we spend over fifteen percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) on health care. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, our health care outcomes ranked only fifteenth among twenty-five industrialized nations worldwide. Adverse effects from prescription drugs have become the third-leading killer of Americans. Only heart disease and cancer claim more lives. We trust our doctors to inform us and our government to protect us from medical malfeasance that may put profits ahead of consumer health and safety. But the fine line walked by the FDA between the interests of the pharmaceutical manufacturers and the American public has continually been crossed. The result is the unleashing of an unprecedented number of lethal drugs on the U.S. market!

Gwen Olsen learned firsthand the danger that lurks in every American's medicine cabinet, working in the pharmaceutical industry. But her most poignant education would come as a victim and, ultimately, as a survivor.

Visit Gwen's Website at

http://www.gwenolsen.com/

Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher
God's Call to Loving Arms

http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Rx-...

This video was produced by Psychetruth

http://www.myspace.com/psychtruth
http://www.youtube.com/psychetruth

© Copyright 2008 Gwen Olsen. All Rights Reserved.

Lilly ‘Ghostwrote’ Articles to Market Drug, Files Say

From Bloomberg: Link

Lilly ‘Ghostwrote’ Articles to Market Drug, Files Say (Update2)

By Elizabeth Lopatto, Jef Feeley and Margaret Cronin Fisk

June 11 (Bloomberg) -- Eli Lilly & Co. officials wrote medical journal studies about the antipsychotic Zyprexa and then asked doctors to put their names on the articles, a practice called “ghostwriting,” according to unsealed company files.

Lilly employees also compiled a guide to hiring scientists to write favorable articles, complained to journal editors when publication was delayed and submitted rejected articles to other outlets, according to documents filed in drug-overpricing suits against the Indianapolis-based company, the largest manufacturer of psychiatric medicines.

Drugmakers’ use of ghostwriters has created “a huge body of medical literature that society can’t trust,” said Carl Elliott, a University of Minnesota bioethicist who has written about the practice. "

Also see this article.

Voices From the Street

From Canada, a collection of articles by and about activism in mental health and consumer-survivors of psychiatric treatment.

Voices From the Street is comprised of individuals who have had direct experience with homelessness, poverty, and/or mental health issues. The organization works to put a human face to homelessness and involves people with direct experience as leaders in a public education process.

Each spring, twelve to fourteen individuals are chosen to take part in a training program—three days a week over a four-month period. The curriculum includes workshops on developing a personal narrative, public speaking skills, conflict resolution, developing key messages, facilitation skills, and diversity training. Pat Capponi, a well-known author and activist on issues of poverty and mental health, is the lead facilitator. Akua Benjamin, a professor and specialist in diversity training from Ryerson University, and John Stapleton, an expert on policy issues, are among the many trainers who work with the participants. In addition to public-speaking skills, graduates of the program have an understanding of policy issues and the need for systemic change.

Link

Senator Grassley Posts Researchers' Drug Company Ties

Senator Grassley writes,

I’m working to shed light on financial relationships between drug companies and doctors. I’ve conducted oversight, and I’m working for passage of legislation that would require public reporting by drug companies of the money they give to doctors for consulting, travel, speeches, meals and other activities. The public interest is clear. We all rely on the advice of doctors, and leading researchers influence the practice of medicine. Taxpayers spend billions of dollars each year on prescription drugs and devices through Medicare and Medicaid. The National Institutes of Health distributes $24 billion annually in federal research grants. So the public has a right to know about financial relationships between doctors and drug companies.

The link offers a collection of names and ties of the famous, powerful - and trusted. Go see for yourself.
PDF
Our previous coverage of Senator Grassley is Pharmaceuticals Anonymous: Bloomberg: NAMI to be probed re Pharma ties> here.

Osler on Medicine

The first duty of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine.
- Sir William Osler
You may also like the interesting Osler quotes
here.

Disease Mongering

"Driving the annual double-digit growth in the legal drug supply are a band of specialist "healthcare" PR companies working for behemoths such as Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Astra Zeneca. Heading the healthcare PR league table are Edelman, Ruder Finn and Chandler Chicco Agency in the US and Medical Action Communications, Shire Health Group and Meditech Media in the UK.

"Medical education" includes cultivating and deploying sponsored "key opinion leaders" such as doctors. Patient groups too can be created or wooed to assist with "disease awareness campaigns" or provide emotionally charged testimony in favor of speedy regulatory approval of new drugs.

Other lucrative revenue streams for healthcare PR companies can include organizing events such as medical conferences that provide a platform for well-trained "product champions" to announce promising results of drug research. Such results can be reported by medical journalists--who can be hired by PR firms--in medical journals that they can create for their clients."

Link

Video: Alison Bass, Journalist and Paxil Whistleblower, Gives a Talk

Visit Alison Bass at her site here.
Now comes news that Paxil is being touted to help cancer sufferers think more clearly. But chemo cancer therapy itself can cause brain fog, as we have seen, and if cancer is a fungus, this therapy is wrong.
What do YOU think?

SSRI Discontinution at Wikipedia

Synaptic/SSRI cartoon above is a spoof.
We'll place this information on "Discontinution syndrome" in our Friends column as well.

Dr. Abram Hoffer Dies, Age 91

All those who have benefited from Dr. Hoffer's knowledge will be sad to learn that the great man has died, age 91....

The International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine gives tribute here.

Canada's GLOBE AND MAIL has an obituary here.

Here Hoffer writes of his own youth and early experiences as a physician. Link



Thank you, Dr. Hoffer.

Vioxx: A Mercky Story

"After paying out almost $5 billion in the US, Merck is defending a class action in Australia where a journal that never was came to light. Meanwhile in the UK victims see no prospect of compensation - writes Prof. Peter Saunders"

There are about 10,000 people in the United Kingdom who believe they are due compensation for damages they suffered while on Merck's Vioxx. These persons cannot get legal aid and if they lose they will have to pay Merck’s costs. Merck has deep pockets so the company has effectively been handed a default victory by the British government. However, in Australia, 1000 Vioxx users are bringing a class action to trial, and the outcome there may be quite different.
Link

Blowback: Agent Orange in Canada

Excerpt from Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home
at link