Beware Drug-Pushing Professional Scientists

ed2hands

hooradiation wrote: »

Fair enough, though I feel I should mention that i believe that making a profit is not, in and of itself, evidence of guilt or wrongdoing.

Agree with that. The focus for this thread i suppose in regard to this would be on to some Pharma products and to the pharmaceutical industrys relationship with the Psychiatric industry. To put it like this:

It would seem that they have a symbiotic relationship; they both benefit and thrive on each others success. The 374 mental disorders listed depending on your opinion could be seen as a misguided attempt by the Psychiatry hierarchy to over-emphasise it's importance in order to create work for itself. Many of these disorders seem to many to not be disorders at all, and should not be classed as such. So this benefits Pharma.

And then vice verca: Pharma benefits from this huge amount of disorders and the massive amount of people who are diagnosed with having them. The Pharma hierarchy adopts a policy of creating medications to supply this demand and profit from it.
It's a case of which came first? the chicken or the egg.

So, in this scenario and if you believe this is all happening because of this relationship, and that healthy people are coming to harm because to this, then doing this to gain profit is unethical.

hooradiation wrote: »

Well, there's a couple of things here - firstly is the prescription of psychoactive drugs to children always a bad thing?

Not sure if you were asking me if if it was rhetorical. I would say not always.

hooradiation wrote: »

I don't know if it's because people have a habit of idolizing the idea of childhood innocence and that mental disorders and the treatment thereof seem to run contrary to that, or if it's something else.
But regardless of the why, I'm not sure that uniformly going "children oughtn't to be given <substance X>" is any wiser than going tot he other extreme of using medicine as the port of first resort.

Good point yet again. Your logic is correct. It's something that is emotive and subjective by it's nature.

hooradiation wrote: »

Secondly - One of the criticisms of the DSM is that there is a question of the reliability and validity of it's diagnosis - but i wouldn't be so quick to say that some of these listed disorders are, in fact, not. Would you have any specific ones in mind when you say that?

Would like to politely leave this one as it would be worthless speculation from a layman. Suffice to say would have my suspicions about some based on what i've read from some professionals opinions, and that the other disorders, though very real, tend to be over-diagnosed.

hooradiation wrote: »

Sadly, life is a pretty risky business. For example, the chances of dying in a road accident of any sort is somewhere in and around 1 in 84, yet this does not stop people from driving, walking near roads, getting on public transport etc. Do you think that the criteria you have for dangerous may be a little too broad?

Would still stand by the contention that in the context of a person who doesn't need to be medicated, giving them a potentially dangerous medication as an act in itself is obviously more dangerous than not giving it.

hooradiation wrote: »

That's a very harsh generalisation of doctors and psychiatrists and I'm not sure it's one that i can believe in.

It was indeed and didn't do the vast majority of well-meaning ones justice when taken as a single statement. It's the system that's to blame for me.
I understand your previous point that you will trust a doctor as he's a professional, but that too might be classed as a generalisation i suppose. Point taken though and as Torakx already said "Consult a doctor"

hooradiation wrote: »

Well, we're still at the stage of it being a matter of opinion that over-medicating is as rampant as you believe it to be, but i am not surprised that
the pharmacutical industry and the medical service one are closely linked - in fact I'd be alarmed if they weren't.

Yes certainly, it's still a matter of opinion. Will keep an eye on it and come back to it at some stage if i see something thats worth posting to shed more light on it either way.
And yes those two industries you mentioned need to be closely linked for the rest of the good work they do.

hooradiation wrote: »

Whatever about the opportunity for the current climate to produce improper relations, if pharmaceutical companies were making medicines and then not talking to the people who prescribe them and see the results day in, day out I'd be far more worried about their motives and the effectiveness of their products.

Yes. Again quite true. This relationship is necessary. The matter then is whether this relationship is being abused. Thanks for replies. Great stuff and food for thought!

Naikon

Interesting to say the least:

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/746672

ed2hands

Mass psychosis in the US
How Big Pharma got America hooked on anti-psychotic drugs

"Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.

Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.

It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.

The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.

Not just for psychotics anymore
By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose PharmedOut project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca.

Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies...."
Rest of article here: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117313948379987.html



Rates of Bipolar Diagnosis in American Youth Jump 40-Fold Over Last Decade

Article here: http://www.narsad.org/?q=node/390/latest-research



Short vid on Pharma fraud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwdsYVHjGA