Understanding Pharmaceuticals

http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Make-resolution-psychiatry/story-20389755-detail/story.html
Childhood behaviour that goes hand-in-hand with the excitement, anticipation and activity, to a psychiatrist, is part of a list used to diagnose and label a child with so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
According to psychiatrists, you may have a compendium of 'disorders'; Translated into psychobabble, you have labels like Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Internet Use Disorder, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

The common denominator however in all of this psychiatric interpretation is opinion, views, assumptions, and guesswork. Psychiatrists have redefined sets of behavioural and emotional characteristics with the expectation that we will accept their words.

John Read, a senior lecturer in psychology said, "Making lists of behaviours, applying medical-sounding labels to people who engage in them, then using the presence of those behaviours to prove they have an illness is scientifically meaningless."

With the dawn of a New Year, it's customary to make resolutions. Yes, one could give up psychiatry. Choose real medicine instead of the profit-driven psychiatric route and a world of labels and drugs.

Brian Daniels

National Spokesperson

Citizens Commission on Human Rights (United Kingdom)

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/wwii-vets-lobotomy-story-tragic-but-not-scandalous//
The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans—and likely hundreds more—during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals.

http://drleonardcoldwell.com/2013/11/25/guns-dont-kill-people-but-big-pharma-does/
There is another common denominator in mass shootings: psychotropic drugs. Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes, Columbine killer Eric Harris, and a host of other mass murdering young killers were on some type of psychotropic drugs when they committed their crimes.

http://naturalsociety.com/gardasil-vaccine-16-year-old-infertile/
Gardasil is the vaccine created by Merck & Co. to stop human papillomavirus (HPV) in young women and men. Unfortunately, to say the vaccine is controversial would be a gross understatement – even a lead developer of the vaccine points out its undeniable dangers and how even how the vaccine is of little use. One recent case study published in the British Medical Journal found that the Gardasil vaccine destroyed the ovaries in a young girl of 16 years, ruining any future hope of her having children.

L-histidine, also a food additive, is a natural amino acid. But, when injected into muscle tissue it can allegedly cause an autoimmune response, leading to serious side effects.

One of the most recent stories detailing evidence of Gardasil’s potential harm comes to us from Australia. Published in the British Medical Journal, this case study involves a 16-year old girl who received the Gardasil vaccine. Soon after, and with prior normal menstruation and overall health, the girl went into menopause, destroying any future hope of having children.

Following the incident, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)—Australia’s equivalent of the FDA—found that Merck failed to ever test the vaccine on potential negative effects to women’s ovaries. While they had tested the vaccine on the testes of male rats, they either forgot or completely neglected to test it on ovaries.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-rt-us-sanofi-lawsuit-20131124,0,1944381.story
BORDEAUX (Reuters) - A French teenager has filed a lawsuit against French pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur and France's health regulators, her lawyer said on Sunday, over side-effects they say were caused by the Gardasil anti-cervical cancer vaccine.

The plaintiff's lawyer, Jean-Christophe Coubris, who is based in Bordeaux, said his now 18-year-old client was 15 when she received two injections of Gardasil, which is made by Merck and sold in Europe by Sanofi.

Within months she was hospitalized for multiple sclerosis, he said.

"She temporarily lost her sight and the use of her legs," Coubris said in a statement.

http://naturalsociety.com/autism-rates-vaccines-increase-simultaneously/#ixzz2kKOU6FvH
Another effort to discount vaccinations as a source of autism has gone into research to prove defective genes as the major culprit. Some epidemiological studies based on twins with autism spectrum disorders was done as early as the mid-1970s. Since then, autism has increased 40-fold. All this from a sudden case of bad genes? This rapid autism rise has coincided with a dramatic increase of early childhood vaccination schedules over the same period, which has been an almost four-fold increase.

The gene theory does not explain how healthy babies suddenly became autistic after undergoing part of an intense series of vaccinations, some shots with multiple-vaccines, at newly born or toddler age.

As a matter of fact, there is very little effort to objectively pursue the autism-vaccination connection. Gene research opposition to the gene theories of autism, or gene theories of many diseases, comes from those who consider environmental causes as primary causal factors, not vaccinations.

Even that opposition is out-funded by the genetic research into autism mindset: $1 billion to $40 million or 25 to 1 over the past ten years. Of course, there is little or no funded research for vaccinations as a major cause for autism. And very little gets out into mainstream media circles about actual adverse effects from vaccinations.

Number of 0-5 Year Olds on Psychotropic Drugs Skyrockets 42% Since 2009
http://www.cchrint.org/2013/09/30/of-0-5-year-olds-on-psychotropic-drugs-skyrockets-42-since-2009/
While the national media has been running that the use of psychotropic drugs in young children has decreased based on a “sample study” of only 43,000 kids, the fact is, according to data obtained from IMS Health, the number of 0-5 year old children on psychiatric drugs has increased 42% since 2009. In 2012, there were 1,085,410 children aged 0-5 on psychiatric drugs, which is the highest the number has been in the last decade.

http://www.cchrint.org/2013/09/12/honey-they-shrunk-my-brain-study-confirms-antipsychotics-decrease-brain-tissue/
Antipsychotic drugs cause brain shrinkage. This is the conclusion of yet another study, considered the largest longitudinal brain-scan data set ever compiled, documenting the adverse effects of antipsychotic drugs on brain tissue.

Andreasen found the results “very upsetting.” With more than six million people, including nearly one million children, (28,000 of them under the age of five), taking Antipsychotics, it’s understandable why the author of the study found the new data “upsetting.”

Antipsychotic medications, such as Seroquel, Abilify, Zyprexa, Risperdal and Geodon are not approved for the treatment of children (18 and under) yet, there are nearly thirty thousand children under the age of five currently prescribed this brain-destructive drug.

Furthermore, the use of antipsychotic drugs long has been referred to as a “chemical lobotomy” because they actually can disable normal brain function. Along with brain shrinkage, antipsychotics also can cause obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.

There also is the side effect called Tardive Dyskinesia, which is a potentially irreversible neurological disorder resulting in involuntary and uncontrollable movements, including slurred speech, tremors, anxiety, inability to sit still, inner restlessness, distress and paranoia.

And the Food and Drug Administration, FDA, requires antipsychotics to carry a “Black Box Warning,” the most serious drug warning issued by the FDA, as the antipsychotics increase the risk of death in elderly with dementia.

Between the FDA and other international drug regulatory agencies, there are no less than 55 warnings on antipsychotic drugs and the FDA, alone, has received more than 120,000 adverse event reports associated with antipsychotic drugs, including diabetes mellitus, pancreatitis, tremor and even death.

Professor Andreasen apparently was so surprised by the results of the study that it was held for two years with the belief that the data may be inaccurate. Unfortunately, the data were accurate and Andreasen pondered the effect the data would have on society.

Antipsychotic drugs shrink the brain, cause excessive weight gain, diabetes, Tardive Dyskinesia, tremors, anxiety, slurred speech, inner restlessness and a host of other adverse effects.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/health/study-finds-vaccinated-baboons-can-still-carry-whooping-cough.html?_r=1&
Baboons vaccinated against whooping cough could still carry the illness in their throats and spread it, research published in a science journal on Monday has found.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/11/20/1314688110
The whooping cough vaccines now in use were introduced in the 1990s after an older version, which offered longer-lasting protection, was found to have side effects. But over the years, scientists have determined that the new vaccines began to lose effectiveness after about five years, a significant problem that many researchers believe has contributed to the significant rise in whooping cough cases.

The current whooping cough vaccines were developed after a surge in concerns from parents that their children were getting fevers and having seizures after receiving the old vaccine. Those worries added fuel to general skepticism about vaccines that had led some parents to choose not to have their children vaccinated.

Medical Marijuana stops child's severe seizures
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/07/health/charlotte-child-medical-marijuana/index.html

Dravet Syndrome is a rare, severe form of intractable epilepsy. Intractable means the seizures are not controlled by medication. The first seizures with Dravet Syndrome usually start before the age of 1. In the second year, other seizures take hold: myoclonus, or involuntary, muscle spasms and status epilepticus, seizures that last more than 30 minutes or come in clusters, one after the other.

At that time, the Figis said, Charlotte was still developing normally, talking and walking the same day as her twin. But the seizures continued to get worse. The medications were also taking a toll. She was on seven drugs -- some of them heavy-duty, addictive ones such as barbiturates and benzodiazepines. They'd work for a while, but the seizures always came back with a vengeance.

Paige took her daughter to Chicago to see a Dravet specialist, who put the child on a ketogenic diet frequently used to treat epilepsy that's high in fat and low in carbohydrates. The special diet forces the body to make extra ketones, natural chemicals that suppress seizures. It's mainly recommended for epileptic patients who don't respond to treatment. Two years into the diet, the seizures came back.

Matt, now a military contractor spending six months a year overseas, used his spare time scouring the Internet looking for anything that would help his little girl.

He found a video online of a California boy whose Dravet was being successfully treated with cannabis. The strain was low in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the compound in marijuana that's psychoactive. It was also high in cannabidiol, or CBD, which has medicinal properties but no psychoactivity. Scientists think the CBD quiets the excessive electrical and chemical activity in the brain that causes seizures. It had worked in this boy; his parents saw a major reduction in the boy's seizures.

By then Charlotte had lost the ability to walk, talk and eat. She was having 300 grand mal seizures a week. Her heart had stopped a number of times. Doctors had even suggested putting Charlotte in a medically induced coma to give her small, battered body a rest. She was 5 when the Figis learned there was nothing more the hospital could do.

That's when Paige decided to try medical marijuana. But finding two doctors to sign off on a medical marijuana card for Charlotte was no easy feat. She was the youngest patient in the state ever to apply.

Scientists don't fully understand the long-term effects early marijuana use may have on children. Studies that show negative effects, such as diminished lung function or increased risk of a heart attack, are primarily done on adult marijuana smokers. But Charlotte wouldn't be smoking the stuff.

Childhood is also a delicate time in brain development. Preliminary research shows that early onset marijuana smokers are slower at tasks, have lower IQs later in life, have a higher risk of stroke and increased incidence of psychotic disorders, leaving some scientists concerned.

Is medical marijuana safe for children?

"Everyone said no, no, no, no, no, and I kept calling and calling," Paige said.

She finally reached Dr. Margaret Gedde, who agree to meet with the family.

"(Charlotte's) been close to death so many times, she's had so much brain damage from seizure activity and likely the pharmaceutical medication," Gedde said. "When you put the potential risks of the cannabis in context like that, it's a very easy decision."

The second doctor to sign on was Alan Shackelford, a Harvard-trained physician who had a number of medical marijuana patients in his care. He wasn't familiar with Dravet and because of Charlotte's age had serious reservations.

"(But) they had exhausted all of her treatment options," Shackelford said. "There really weren't any steps they could take beyond what they had done. Everything had been tried -- except cannabis."
Paige found a Denver dispensary that had a small amount of a type of marijuana called R4, said to be low in THC and high in CBD. She paid about $800 for 2 ounces -- all that was available -- and had a friend extract the oil.

She had the oil tested at a lab and started Charlotte out on a small dose. The results were stunning.

"When she didn't have those three, four seizures that first hour, that was the first sign," Paige recalled. "And I thought well, 'Let's go another hour, this has got to be a fluke.' " The seizures stopped for another hour. And for the following seven days.

Paige said she couldn't believe it. Neither could Matt. But their supply was running out.

Paige soon heard about the Stanley brothers, one of the state's largest marijuana growers and dispensary owners. These six brothers were crossbreeding a strain of marijuana also high in CBD and low in THC, but they didn't know what to do with it. No one wanted it; they couldn't sell it.

"The biggest misconception about treating a child like little Charlotte is most people think that we're getting her high, most people think she's getting stoned," Josh Stanley said, stressing his plant's low THC levels.

Today, Charlotte, 6, is thriving. Her seizures only happen two to three times per month, almost solely in her sleep. Not only is she walking, she can ride her bicycle. She feeds herself and is talking more and more each day.

"I literally see Charlotte's brain making connections that haven't been made in years," Matt said. "My thought now is, why were we the ones that had to go out and find this cure? This natural cure? How come a doctor didn't know about this? How come they didn't make me aware of this?"

The marijuana strain Charlotte and now 41 other patients use to ease painful symptoms of diseases such as epilepsy and cancer has been named after the little girl who is getting her life back one day at a time.

Mental illness: is 'chemical imbalance' theory a myth?
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2013/10/18/mental_illness_is_chemical_imbalance_theory_a_myth.html

An evolving half-century of medical wisdom came to this conclusion:

Just as coronary diseases — or those of the liver, or kidneys for that matter — were plainly the result of physiological disruptions, so too were the mental illnesses of the brain.

Now, neuroscience would attribute such things as depression and psychosis to “chemical imbalances” — specifically to disruptions in the neurotransmitters that allow the brain’s billions upon billions of grey matter cells to speak to one another.

And so mental illnesses became normalized and destigmatized.

And so their treatments, to a huge extent, came off of the couch, out of the asylums and onto pharmacy counters.

And so a $70-billion drug market grew to feed tens of millions worldwide with daily doses of magic bullets — pills that could bring their brain chemistry back into balance.

Trouble is, in the minds of many neuroscientists today, that chemical imbalance theory has turned out to be a myth, with little more scientific or medicinal substance than poetry or song.

And the pills are now largely recognized by a multitude of experts, as well as some of the pharmaceutical companies that make them, as concoctions of magical thinking.

Neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine are the brain’s chemical ferrymen, allowing electrical impulses to cross from one synapse to another in the mesmerizing cascades of neuronal connections that render thought, emotions, movement initiation and a host of other brain activities.

Imbalances in these communicating chemicals, it was held, were the key cause of the major psychiatric disorders. And targeting these imbalances with drugs became the obvious strategy to treat mental illnesses.

In schizophrenia, for example, it was the dopamine system that was out of whack, while serotonin shortages triggered depression.

But Shorter says the past several years have seen the chemical imbalance theory fall in status from bedrock scientific principle to mere marketing device in the minds of many researchers.

“The view among neuroscientists is that this emphasis on neurotransmitters as the cause of mental illness is more of a (drug sales) concept than a scientific concept,” he says.

“It helps drug companies sell drugs.”

It does so, Shorter says, by giving physicians an organic medical justification — akin to high cholesterol in cardiovascular diseases or blood sugar levels in diabetes — to prescribe the drugs, while offering patients a comforting rational for taking them.

“But in fact nobody knows what the cause of these mental illnesses (are),” Shorter says. “Almost certainly the cause is situated somewhere in the brain, but what the neurochemistry of psychiatric illness is remains a complete black box.”

With schizophrenia, there is no question that one of the five neural receptors that welcome dopamine into brain cells is a key player in the disease, Phillips says.

And drugs that block that “D2” receptor work wonders in calming psychotic symptoms in schizophrenic patients, whether a dopamine imbalance is the sole cause of the disease or not, he says.

Even Phillips, however, concedes that those touting the neurotransmitter theory overplayed their hand in depression research.

“Where I think this whole argument got off the track was in the case of the antidepressants, no question,” he says. “The idea that depression simply reflects too little serotonin is clearly an overinterpretation of the data.”

Phillips, however, says new research shows that disruptions in other neurotransmitters like dopamine are also involved in depressive disorders.

He says as well that current antidepressants may well be acting to stimulate neural stem cells, which could also be the source of their therapeutic effects.

Dating back to 1949, these included the discovery of drugs like Lithium to treat manic depression, Thorazine to combat schizophrenia, the antidepressant Tofranil and the sedatives Librium and Valium.

But these discoveries resulted almost entirely from serendipitous accidents, Greenberg says. And scientists only went searching for the neurological roots of the drugs’ workings after the fact.

They hit on neurotransmitters, which were first identified in the 1950s and provided an appealing answer, one that allowed pharmaceutical companies to market the drugs with scientific authority.

Decades of frustrating research chipped away at the neurotransmitter theory, until it was left in rubble, Greenberg says.

It’s not uncommon in medicine to look for a drug’s mechanisms after its discovery, he said in an interview with the Star.

Even among the patients who do respond to the SSRI drugs, Shorter says there is no evidence that a great many of them exhibit serotonin shortages.

“They may well have some other mechanism that is entirely unknown to us,” he says.

“The neurochemistry of the brain is very complicated. We don’t even know how much we don’t know.”

What is almost certainly known, however, is that there is a large placebo effect in play with modern antidepressants, Shorter says.

He says re-examinations of the research results that won antidepressant drugs their regulatory approval to begin with have shown that they fared little better than sugar pills in several clinical trials.

“In about half of the trials they failed to beat placebos, they just are not very effective drugs (for some forms of depression),” he says.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31766160/#.Uo2x-eLfCLI
About two years ago, dozens of workers at a large chicken hatchery in Arkansas began experiencing mysterious skin rashes, with painful lumps scattered over their hands, arms, and legs.

"They hurt real bad," says Joyce Long, 48, a 32-year veteran of the hatchery, where until recently, workers handled eggs and chicks with bare hands. "When we went and got cultured, doctors told us we had a superbug."

Its name, she learned, was MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This form of staph bacteria developed a mutation that resists antibiotics (including methicillin), making it hard to treat, even lethal. According to the CDC, certain types of MRSA infections kill 18,000 Americans a year — more than die from AIDS.

http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/bret-bohn/
Bret Byron Bohn is a native Alaskan who loves hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, and most outdoor activities. He lived an exemplary life receiving many awards as a youth, became a member of the National Honor Society, and achieved the distinguished rank of Eagle Scout. He had recently graduated from a program in Aviation Technology.

At 26-years-old, Bohn worked as a field guide for hunters and outdoorsmen on expeditions in the Alaskan wilderness. While otherwise healthy and athletic, his only medical issue was the development of some nasal polyps which impeded his ability to smell. He had them surgically removed, but they grew back. He was prescribed Prednisone - a powerful steroid and immune suppressant - to attempt to regain his sense of smell.

While on Predisone, he began suffering with the inability to sleep for a prolonged period. After a week of insomnia, his family took him to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. They hadn't realized it at the time, but one of the listed side effects of Prednisone is sleep disturbances (insomnia).

Rather than take him off of the drug that was likely causing the sleep problem, doctors prescribed two more powerful drugs to supposedly calm him down and help him sleep. He was given Zolpidem (brand name Ambien) which treats insomnia, as well as Lorazepam (brand name Ativan) which treats anxiety, depression and insomnia.

After taking the prescribed combination of drugs at at home, Bohn had seizures - potentially because the drugs he took are known to cause seizures. His family took him back to the hospital, looking for answers, and he was given more drugs, and had more seizures. He was put into intensive care.

Hospitalization

His hospitalization would be marked by periods of prolonged periods of sleep deprivation, apparently related to his medications.

Physical tests to this point had turned up no signs of what could be wrong with Bohn. Over 35 lab tests failed to produce abnormal results.

Bohn remained unable to sleep for a total of 24 days. His condition was severely diminished. He was in a state of "delirium," according to court records. His family assumed power of attorney over Bret through a written agreement he had previously drawn up in 2007.

At one point the exhausted patient decided he had enough and removed himself from his IV, unplugged himself from his machines, and removed his catheter. He wanted to leave.

Bohn was convinced to calm down with the help of his family, whom at first trusted the doctors' course of action. They began to object to when it was evident to them that the drug therapy was hurting Bret, not helping. Soon they were pleading with doctors to take him off of the drugs in order to let him sleep. At one point doctors briefly relented, and Bohn was finally able to sleep - for a time.

The hospital filed a notice with the court of the "escape attempt" and that Mr. Bohn was a danger to himself and that his parents were not suitable guardians. An emergency guardianship role was granted over him. His parents' power of attorney was considered null and void. His written will was overridden.

A friend visits Bret, before visitation was prohibited.
Doctors characterized his disgruntled, combative state - after weeks of insomnia - as a sign of mental illness, and that he was irrational and a threat to himself. Hospital staff put him into a psychiatric ward, physically forcing his compliance. They began administering psychiatric drugs, beginning with Haldol, which is used to treat schizophrenia.

No Diagnosis, No Rights

After the disputes between doctors and parents over his medication, Providence portrayed Bohn's family as interfering with his treatment and a threat to his well-being. They alleged that they were going to help him leave without being medically discharged, and that they did not have his best interests in mind in light of his supposedly life-threatening illness - which as of then remained undiagnosed. They alleged that his mother, Lorraine Phillips, wanted to physically harm her son, Bret.

His ability to have visitors was reduced to once per week. Phone calls were not allowed. He was effectively a prisoner on the 5th floor of Providence, and doctors were free to medicate him with impunity.