When Medicine Went Mad

Bioethics issues from the Holocaust. Are they still relevant today? Mature content. Link to Google books

Vortex of Mental Illness Map and Kitbag

Detail - From International Futures Forum an update on the old game of Snakes and Ladders. Kudos for this outstanding graphic design, which really help us think about these problems in a new way - to get inside them. Image
See more MacroVu diagrams here
http://www.macrovu.com/
MacroVu/Stanford's map re mental health care mess here
http://web.archive.org/web/20011129070448/www.stanford.edu/~rhorn/images/PortlandDynamics.pdf

"Vortex of mental illness
December 4th, 2008

You might wonder why Kitbag was first tested at Cornton Vale women’s prison in Scotland.

This came about following a meeting between the governor and me in response to work I had done on improving services for adult survivors of sexual abuse. The prison population has a high percentage of women survivors and the governor was wondering whether there was anything more she could be doing to help them recover from their trauma.

I showed her work the IFF had done in Fife which examined the systemic behaviours that drive people ever deeper into care and custodial services as they slip out of the support of family, friends and community. Bob Horn, an expert in visual language, helped us illustrate our thinking with a mural called the Vortex of Mental Illness. You can link through to it from this post: I would be interested in your views.

When I had a prototype Kitbag to show her, it seemed sensible to return to the prison to see if they woudl be interested in using it with their women. The Head of Care and governor were both keen. They liked its holistic/wellness perspective. With modifications for the prison environment and agreement with mental health nursing staff, we gave three women the kits and worked through each pocket over a year.

We are now planning to expand this work to include more women, using a peer education model.

Margaret Hannah"

Kitbag - what is it?


We think massage, lighting candles and drawing divination cards are fine. However, what people need first to shake their "psychological problems" and "addictions" is correct diagnosis and treatment of their nutritional and other underlying health problems. When we checked we found only one link on nutrition at International Futures Forum.

Here's an earlier post on using nutrition to
get through heroin withdrawal.

Secrecy shields medical mishaps from public view

Almost 200,000 people a year die from preventable medical errors and hospital acquired infections. More people die from preventable medical errors and hospital-acquired infections than from alcohol-related auto accidents, murder, illegal drugs and suicide combined.
Link

DSM: Once APA's Fundraiser, Now Drives the Psych Industry

What's wrong with the DSM?

Plenty.

DSM authors in bed with Big Pharma

"Soaring ambition and remarkably weak methodology" - pdf

Slate weighs the evidence against the APA and DSM

DSM Funding/Finances (2005)

Unethical Psychiatrists Misrepresent What is Known About Schizophrenia

by Al Siebert, Ph.D.
Abstract: Prominent psychiatrists are stating that schizophrenia is a brain disease like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or multiple sclerosis. These statements are disconfirmed by scientific facts: no neurologist can independently confirm the presence or absence of schizophrenia with laboratory tests because the large majority of people diagnosed with schizophrenia show no neuropathological or biochemical abnormalities and a few people without any symptoms of schizophrenia have the same biophysiological abnormalities. People with schizophrenia do not usually progressively deteriorate: most improve over time. Psychotherapy and milieu therapy, without medications, have led even the most severely disturbed individuals with schizophrenia to full recovery and beyond. Many people diagnosed with schizophrenia have recovered on their own without any treatment, something never accomplished by a person with Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or multiple sclerosis. Link


This junk science diagram speaks volumes about this kind of scholarship.
From http://stahlonline.cambridge.org/content/ep/images/85702c09_fig43.jpg

Read our entry about the mother of Prince Philip, who made a complete recovery from schizophrenia:
Link

The 29 verifiable, correctable causes of schizophrenia are listed
here.

NYT: Dr. Drug Rep

Dr. Daniel Carlat tells us how he and other physicians are wooed - and very well paid - to become "Doctor" drug reps.
He is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the publisher of The Carlat Psychiatry Report.

As the reps became comfortable with me, they began to see me more as a sales colleague. I received faxes before talks preparing me for particular doctors. One note informed me that the physician we’d be visiting that day was a “decile 6 doctor and is not prescribing any Effexor XR, so please tailor accordingly. There is also one more doc in the practice that we are not familiar with.” The term “decile 6” is drug-rep jargon for a doctor who prescribes a lot of medications. The higher the “decile” (in a range from 1 to 10), the higher the prescription volume, and the more potentially lucrative that doctor could be for the company.

A note from another rep reminded me of a scene from “Mission: Impossible.” “Dr. Carlat: Our main target, Dr. , is an internist. He spreads his usage among three antidepressants, Celexa, Zoloft and Paxil, at about 25-30 percent each. He is currently using about 6 percent Effexor XR. Our access is very challenging with lunches six months out.” This doctor’s schedule of lunches was filled with reps from other companies; it would be vital to make our sales visit count.+

Naïve as I was, I found myself astonished at the level of detail that drug companies were able to acquire about doctors’ prescribing habits. I asked my reps about it; they told me that they received printouts tracking local doctors’ prescriptions every week. The process is called “prescription data-mining,” in which specialized pharmacy-information companies (like IMS Health and Verispan) buy prescription data from local pharmacies, repackage it, then sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This information is then passed on to the drug reps, who use it to tailor their drug-detailing strategies. This may include deciding which physicians to aim for, as my Wyeth reps did, but it can help sales in other ways. For example, Shahram Ahari, a former drug rep for Eli Lilly (the maker of Prozac) who is now a researcher at the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy, said in an article in The Washington Post that as a drug rep he would use this data to find out which doctors were prescribing Prozac’s competitors, like Effexor. Then he would play up specific features of Prozac that contrasted favorably with the other drug, like the ease with which patients can get off Prozac, as compared with the hard time they can have withdrawing from Effexor.

The American Medical Association is also a key player in prescription data-mining. Pharmacies typically will not release doctors’ names to the data-mining companies, but they will release their Drug Enforcement Agency numbers. The A.M.A. licenses its file of U.S. physicians, allowing the data-mining companies to match up D.E.A. numbers to specific physicians. The A.M.A. makes millions in information-leasing money.

Once drug companies have identified the doctors, they must woo them. In the April 2007 issue of the journal PLoS Medicine, Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown teamed up with Ahari (the former drug rep) to describe the myriad techniques drug reps use to establish relationships with physicians, including inviting them to a speaker’s meeting. These can serve to cement a positive a relationship between the rep and the doctor. This relationship is crucial, they say, since “drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.”

Link

Former drug rep Gwen Olsen talks about manipulating doctors.

GOOD Magazine: America's Problem Drugs

There is a drug use great graphic at this site. However it does not reflect that legal medications - pharmaceuticals - account for America's biggest addiction and fatality problems. The biggest "drug dealers" are listed on the Stock Exchange.