Diary of a Mad Crone

Do No Harm??

2011-03-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

The book, A Question of Torture talks about the psychiatric assistance with torturing "terrorists". This is from the book Kind and Usual Punishment by Jessica Mitford about the aid of psychiatrists in the prison industry:
(quoting Edgar H. Schein"s article entitled "Man against man: Brainwashing" in the Corrective Psychiatry and Journal of Social Change, Vol 8, No 2)

My basic argument is this: in order to produce masked change of behavior and/or attitude, it is necessary to weaken, undermine or remove the supports to the old patterns of behavior ... either by removing the individual physically and preventing any communication with those whom he cares about, or by proving to him that those he respects are not worthy of it and should be actively mistrusted. Korean brainwashing techniques in service of different goals my be quite acceptable to us...I would like you to think of brainwashing not in terms of politics, ethics and morals but in terms of the deliberate changing of human behavior and attitudes by a group of men who have relatively complete control over the environment in which the captive population lives. Techniques such as social disorganization and the creation of mutual mistrust by spying on the men and reporting back private material; tricking men into written statements to convince men they can trust no one, undermining ties to home by the systematic withholding of mail. If one wants to produce behavior inconsistent with the person's standards of conduct, first disorganize the group which supports those standards, then undermine his other emotional supports, then put him into a new and ambiguous situation for which the standards are unclear, and then put pressure on him.

The Problem with 2nd Opinions

2010-11-22T10:29:00.000-08:00

"Every doctor will a allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the professional etipuette by giving him away" - George Bernard Shaw

Drug Reps manipulate Doctors - Duh

2010-11-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

I heard on NPR that the drug reps tell doctors that they are "thought leaders" and ask them to be speakers at conferences. The technique may not inspire the people at the lecture, but the "thought leaders" become money machines for the drug because they are the target of the rep, not the audience at all. Narcissism is a psychiatric problem that lots of doctors struggle with and none so much as the psychiatrists who are looked down on by other medical fields.

Medical Guinea Pig Roundup

2008-12-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

Washington state says victims can become a medical guinea pig without consent.

Prisoners as guinea pigs

Australian aborigines used as guinea pigs

Vermont experiments on mental patients in early 50's

And from this site a few highlights:

(1845 - 1849) J. Marion Sims, later hailed as the "father of gynecology," performs medical experiments on enslaved African women without anesthesia. These women would usually die of infection soon after surgery. Based on his belief that the movement of newborns' skull bones during protracted births causes trismus, he also uses a shoemaker's awl, a pointed tool shoemakers use to make holes in leather, to practice moving the skull bones of babies born to enslaved mothers (Brinker).

(1895)
New York pediatrician Henry Heiman infects a 4-year-old boy whom he calls "an idiot with chronic epilepsy" with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

(1896)
Dr. Arthur Wentworth turns 29 children at Boston's Children's Hospital into human guinea pigs when he performs spinal taps on them, just to test whether the procedure is harmful (Sharav).

(1906)
Harvard professor Dr. Richard Strong infects prisoners in the Philippines with cholera to study the disease; 13 of them die. He compensates survivors with cigars and cigarettes. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors cite this study to justify their own medical experiments (Greger, Sharav).

(1911)
Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research publishes data on injecting an inactive syphilis preparation into the skin of 146 hospital patients and normal children in an attempt to develop a skin test for syphilis. Later, in 1913, several of these children's parents sue Dr. Noguchi for allegedly infecting their children with syphilis ("Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War").

(1913)
Medical experimenters "test" 15 children at the children's home St. Vincent's House in Philadelphia with tuberculin, resulting in permanent blindness in some of the children. Though the Pennsylvania House of Representatives records the incident, the researchers are not punished for the experiments ("Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After").

(1915)
Dr. Joseph Goldberger, under order of the U.S. Public Health Office, produces Pellagra, a debilitating disease that affects the central nervous system, in 12 Mississippi inmates to try to find a cure for the disease. One test subject later says that he had been through "a thousand hells." In 1935, after millions die from the disease, the director of the U.S Public Health Office would finally admit that officials had known that it was caused by a niacin deficiency for some time, but did nothing about it because it mostly affected poor African-Americans. During the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors used this study to try to justify their medical experiments on concentration camp inmates (Greger; Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1932)
(1932-1972) The U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Ala. diagnoses 400 poor, black sharecroppers with syphilis but never tells them of their illness nor treats them; instead researchers use the men as human guinea pigs to follow the symptoms and progression of the disease. They all eventually die from syphilis and their families are never told that they could have been treated (Goliszek, University of Virginia Health System Health Sciences Library).

(1939)
In order to test his theory on the roots of stuttering, prominent speech pathologist Dr. Wendell Johnson performs his famous "Monster Experiment" on 22 children at the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport. Dr. Johnson and his graduate students put the children under intense psychological pressure, causing them to switch from speaking normally to stuttering heavily. At the time, some of the students reportedly warn Dr. Johnson that, "in the aftermath of World War II, observers might draw comparisons to Nazi experiments on human subjects, which could destroy his career" (Alliance for Human Research Protection).

(1941)
Dr. William C. Black infects a 12-month-old baby with herpes as part of a medical experiment. At the time, the editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, calls it "an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science" (Sharav).

An article in a 1941 issue of Archives of Pediatrics describes medical studies of the severe gum disease Vincent's angina in which doctors transmit the disease from sick children to healthy children with oral swabs (Goliszek).

Researchers give 800 poverty-stricken pregnant women at a Vanderbilt University prenatal clinic "cocktails" including radioactive iron in order to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women (Pacchioli).

(1942)
The Chemical Warfare Service begins mustard gas and lewisite experiments on 4,000 members of the U.S. military. Some test subjects don't realize they are volunteering for chemical exposure experiments, like 17-year-old Nathan Schnurman, who in 1944 thinks he is only volunteering to test "U.S. Navy summer clothes" (Goliszek).

Merck Pharmaceuticals President George Merck is named director of the War Research Service (WRS), an agency designed to oversee the establishment of a biological warfare program (Goliszek).

(1944 - 1946) A captain in the medical corps addresses an April 1944 memo to Col. Stanford Warren, head of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section, expressing his concerns about atom bomb component fluoride's central nervous system (CNS) effects and asking for animal research to be done to determine the extent of these effects: "Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a rather marked central nervous system effect ... It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor ... Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after exposure." The following year, the Manhattan Project would begin human-based studies on fluoride's effects (Griffiths and Bryson).

The Manhattan Project medical team, led by the now infamous University of Rochester radiologist Col. Safford Warren, injects plutonium into patients at the University's teaching hospital, Strong Memorial (Burton Report).

(1945)
Continuing the Manhattan Project, researchers inject plutonium into three patients at the University of Chicago's Billings Hospital (Sharav).

The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA begin Operation Paperclip, offering Nazi scientists immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on aerodynamics and chemical warfare medicine in the United States ("Project Paperclip").

(1945 - 1955) In Newburgh, N.Y., researchers linked to the Manhattan Project begin the most extensive American study ever done on the health effects of fluoridating public drinking water (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1946)
Continuing the Newburg study of 1945, the Manhattan Project commissions the University of Rochester to study fluoride's effects on animals and humans in a project codenamed "Program F." With the help of the New York State Health Department, Program F researchers secretly collect and analyze blood and tissue samples from Newburg residents. The studies are sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and take place at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Strong Memorial Hospital (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1946 - 1947) University of Rochester researchers inject four male and two female human test subjects with uranium-234 and uranium-235 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to 70.7 micrograms per one kilogram of body weight in order to study how much uranium they could tolerate before their kidneys become damaged (Goliszek).

Six male employees of a Chicago metallurgical laboratory are given water contaminated with plutonium-239 to drink so that researchers can learn how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract (Goliszek).

Researchers begin using patients in VA hospitals as test subjects for human medical experiments, cleverly worded as "investigations" or "observations" in medical study reports to avoid negative connotations and bad publicity (Sharav).

The American public finally learns of the biowarfare experiments being done at Fort Detrick from a report released by the War Department (Goliszek).

(1947)
Col. E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issues a top-secret document (707075) dated Jan. 8. In it, he writes that "certain radioactive substances are being prepared for intravenous administration to human subjects as a part of the work of the contract" (Goliszek).

A secret AEC document dated April 17 reads, "It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits," revealing that the U.S. government was aware of the health risks its nuclear tests posed to military personnel conducting the tests or nearby civilians (Goliszek).

The CIA begins studying LSD's potential as a weapon by using military and civilian test subjects for experiments without their consent or even knowledge. Eventually, these LSD studies will evolve into the MKULTRA program in 1953 (Sharav).

(1947 - 1953) The U.S. Navy begins Project Chatter to identify and test so-called "truth serums," such as those used by the Soviet Union to interrogate spies. Mescaline and the central nervous system depressant scopolamine are among the many drugs tested on human subjects (Goliszek).

(1948)
Based on the secret studies performed on Newburgh, N.Y. residents beginning in 1945, Project F researchers publish a report in the August 1948 edition of the Journal of the American Dental Association, detailing fluoride's health dangers. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) quickly censors it for "national security" reasons (Griffiths and Bryson).

(1950)
(1950 - 1953) The U.S. Army releases chemical clouds over six American and Canadian cities. Residents in Winnipeg, Canada, where a highly toxic chemical called cadmium is dropped, subsequently experience high rates of respiratory illnesses (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In order to determine how susceptible an American city could be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of Bacillus globigii bacteria from ships over the San Francisco shoreline. According to monitoring devices situated throughout the city to test the extent of infection, the eight thousand residents of San Francisco inhale five thousand or more bacteria particles, many becoming sick with pneumonia-like symptoms (Goliszek).

Dr. Joseph Strokes of the University of Pennsylvania infects 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis to study the disease (Sharav).

Doctors at the Cleveland City Hospital study changes in cerebral blood flow by injecting test subjects with spinal anesthesia, inserting needles in their jugular veins and brachial arteries, tilting their heads down and, after massive blood loss causes paralysis and fainting, measuring their blood pressure. They often perform this experiment multiple times on the same subject (Goliszek).

Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, later of MKULTRA infamy due to his 1957 to1964 experiments on Canadians, publishes an article in the British Journal of Physical Medicine, in which he describes experiments that entail forcing schizophrenic patients at Manitoba's Brandon Mental Hospital to lie naked under 15- to 200-watt red lamps for up to eight hours per day. His other experiments include placing mental patients in an electric cage that overheats their internal body temperatures to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and inducing comas by giving patients large injections of insulin (Goliszek).

(1951)
The U.S. Army secretly contaminates the Norfolk Naval Supply Center in Virginia and Washington, D.C.'s National Airport with a strain of bacteria chosen because African-Americans were believed to be more susceptible to it than Caucasians. The experiment causes food poisoning, respiratory problems and blood poisoning (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1951 - 1956) Under contract with the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM), the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston begins studying the effects of radiation on cancer patients -- many of them members of minority groups or indigents, according to sources -- in order to determine both radiation's ability to treat cancer and the possible long-term radiation effects of pilots flying nuclear-powered planes. The study lasts until 1956, involving 263 cancer patients. Beginning in 1953, the subjects are required to sign a waiver form, but it still does not meet the informed consent guidelines established by the Wilson memo released that year. The TBI studies themselves would continue at four different institutions -- Baylor University College of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine -- until 1971 (U.S. Department of Energy, Goliszek).

American, Canadian and British military and intelligence officials gather a small group of eminent psychologists to a secret meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Montreal about Communist "thought-control techniques." They proposed a top-secret research program on behavior modification -- involving testing drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and lobotomies on humans (Barker).

(1952)
At the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute, Chester M. Southam injects live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison to study the progression of the disease. Half of the prisoners in this National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) study are black, awakening racial suspicions stemming from Tuskegee, which was also an NIH-sponsored study (Merritte, et al.).

(1953 - 1974) The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsors iodine studies at the University of Iowa. In the first study, researchers give pregnant women 100 to 200 microcuries of iodine-131 and then study the women's aborted embryos in order to learn at what stage and to what extent radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In the second study, researchers give 12 male and 13 female newborns under 36 hours old and weighing between 5.5 and 8.5 pounds iodine-131 either orally or via intramuscular injection, later measuring the concentration of iodine in the newborns' thyroid glands (Goliszek).

As part of an AEC study, researchers feed 28 healthy infants at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine iodine-131 through a gastric tube and then test concentration of iodine in the infants' thyroid glands 24 hours later (Goliszek).

(1953 - 1957) Eleven patients at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston are injected with uranium as part of the Manhattan Project (Sharav).

In an AEC-sponsored study at the University of Tennessee, researchers inject healthy two- to three-day-old newborns with approximately 60 rads of iodine-131 (Goliszek).

Newborn Daniel Burton becomes blind when physicians at Brooklyn Doctors Hospital perform an experimental high oxygen treatment for Retrolental Fibroplasia, a retinal disorder affecting premature infants, on him and other premature babies. The physicians perform the experimental treatment despite earlier studies showing that high oxygen levels cause blindness. Testimony in Burton v. Brooklyn Doctors Hospital (452 N.Y.S.2d875) later reveals that researchers continued to give Burton and other infants excess oxygen even after their eyes had swelled to dangerous levels (Goliszek, Sharav).

A 1953 article in Clinical Science describes a medical experiment in which researchers purposely blister the abdomens of 41 children, ranging in age from eight to 14, with cantharide in order to study how severely the substance irritates the skin (Goliszek).

The AEC performs a series of field tests known as "Green Run," dropping radiodine 131 and xenon 133 over the Hanford, Wash. site -- 500,000 acres encompassing three small towns (Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland) along the Columbia River (Sharav).

In an AEC-sponsored study to learn whether radioactive iodine affects premature babies differently from full-term babies, researchers at Harper Hospital in Detroit give oral doses of iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants weighing between 2.1 and 5.5 pounds (Goliszek).

(1955 - 1957) In order to learn how cold weather affects human physiology, researchers give a total of 200 doses of iodine-131, a radioactive tracer that concentrates almost immediately in the thyroid gland, to 85 healthy Eskimos and 17 Athapascan Indians living in Alaska. They study the tracer within the body by blood, thyroid tissue, urine and saliva samples from the test subjects. Due to the language barrier, no one tells the test subjects what is being done to them, so there is no informed consent (Goliszek).

(1956 - 1957) U.S. Army covert biological weapons researchers release mosquitoes infected with yellow fever and dengue fever over Savannah, Ga., and Avon Park, Fla., to test the insects' ability to carry disease. After each test, Army agents pose as public health officials to test victims for effects and take pictures of the unwitting test subjects. These experiments result in a high incidence of fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid among the two cities' residents, as well as several deaths (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

(1957)
The U.S. military conducts Operation Plumbbob at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Operation Pumbbob consists of 29 nuclear detonations, eventually creating radiation expected to result in a total 32,000 cases of thyroid cancer among civilians in the area. Around 18,000 members of the U.S. military participate in Operation Pumbbob's Desert Rock VII and VIII, which are designed to see how the average foot soldier physiologically and mentally responds to a nuclear battlefield ("Operation Plumbbob", Goliszek).

(1957 - 1964) As part of MKULTRA, the CIA pays McGill University Department of Psychiatry founder Dr. D. Ewen Cameron $69,000 to perform LSD studies and potentially lethal experiments on Canadians being treated for minor disorders like post-partum depression and anxiety at the Allan Memorial Institute, which houses the Psychiatry Department of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. The CIA encourages Dr. Cameron to fully explore his "psychic driving" concept of correcting madness through completely erasing one's memory and rewriting the psyche. These "driving" experiments involve putting human test subjects into drug-, electroshock- and sensory deprivation-induced vegetative states for up to three months, and then playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements for weeks or months in order to "rewrite" the "erased" psyche. Dr. Cameron also gives human test subjects paralytic drugs and electroconvulsive therapy 30 to 40 times, as part of his experiments. Most of Dr. Cameron's test subjects suffer permanent damage as a result of his work (Goliszek, "Donald Ewan Cameron").

In order to study how blood flows through children's brains, researchers at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child's femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale a special gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek).

(1958)
The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) drops radioactive materials over Point Hope, Alaska, home to the Inupiats, in a field test known under the codename "Project Chariot" (Sharav).

(1961)
In response to the Nuremberg Trials, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram begins his famous Obedience to Authority Study in order to answer his question "Could it be that (Adolf) Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" Male test subjects, ranging in age from 20 to 40 and coming from all education backgrounds, are told to give "learners" electric shocks for every wrong answer the learners give in response to word pair questions. In reality, the learners are actors and are not receiving electric shocks, but what matters is that the test subjects do not know that. Astoundingly, they keep on following orders and continue to administer increasingly high levels of "shocks," even after the actor learners show obvious physical pain ("Milgram Experiment").

(1962)
Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).

The FDA begins requiring that a new pharmaceutical undergo three human clinical trials before it will approve it. From 1962 to 1980, pharmaceutical companies satisfy this requirement by running Phase I trials, which determine a drug's toxicity, on prison inmates, giving them small amounts of cash for compensation (Sharav).

(1963)
Chester M. Southam, who injected Ohio State Prison inmates with live cancer cells in 1952, performs the same procedure on 22 senile, African-American female patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in order to watch their immunological response. Southam tells the patients that they are receiving "some cells," but leaves out the fact that they are cancer cells. He claims he doesn't obtain informed consent from the patients because he does not want to frighten them by telling them what he is doing, but he nevertheless temporarily loses his medical license because of it. Ironically, he eventually becomes president of the American Cancer Society (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation's effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).

(1963 - 1966) New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine (Hammer Breslow).

(1963 - 1971) Leading endocrinologist Dr. Carl Heller gives 67 prison inmates at Oregon State Prison in Salem $5 per month and $25 per testicular tissue biopsy in compensation for allowing him to perform irradiation experiments on their testes. If they receive vasectomies at the end of the study, the prisoners are given an extra $100 (Sharav, Goliszek).

Researchers inject a genetic compound called radioactive thymidine into the testicles of more than 100 Oregon State Penitentiary inmates to learn whether sperm production is affected by exposure to steroid hormones (Greger).

In a study published in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of California's Department of Pediatrics use 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old in a series of experiments used to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one study, doctors insert a catheter through the newborns' umbilical arteries and into their aortas and then immerse the newborns' feet in ice water while recording aortic pressure. In another experiment, doctors strap 50 newborns to a circumcision board, tilt the table so that all the blood rushes to their heads and then measure their blood pressure (Goliszek).

(1964 - 1967) The Dow Chemical Company pays Professor Kligman $10,000 to learn how dioxin -- a highly toxic, carcinogenic component of Agent Orange -- and other herbicides affect human skin because workers at the chemical plant have been developing an acne-like condition called Chloracne and the company would like to know whether the chemicals they are handling are to blame. As part of the study, Professor Kligman applies roughly the amount of dioxin Dow employees are exposed to on the skin 60 prisoners, and is disappointed when the prisoners show no symptoms of Chloracne. In 1980 and 1981, the human guinea pigs used in this study would begin suing Professor Kligman for complications including lupus and psychological damage (Kaye).

(1965)
As part of a test codenamed "Big Tom," the Department of Defense sprays Oahu, Hawaii's most heavily populated island, with Bacillus globigii in order to simulate an attack on an island complex. Bacillus globigii causes infections in people with weakened immune systems, but this was not known to scientists at the time (Goliszek, Martin).

(1966)
U.S. Army scientists drop light bulbs filled with Bacillus subtilis through ventilation gates and into the New York City subway system, exposing more than one million civilians, including women and children, to the bacteria (Goliszek).

(1967)
The CIA places a chemical in the drinking water supply of the FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. to see whether it is possible to spike drinking water with LSD and other substances (Cockburn and St. Clair, eds.).

In a study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers inject pregnant women with radioactive cortisol to see if the radioactive material will cross the placentas and affect the fetuses (Goliszek).

The U.S. Army pays Professor Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to Holmesburg Prison inmates' faces and backs, so as to, in Professor Kligman's words, "learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process," information which would have both offensive and defensive applications for the U.S. military (Kaye).

Professor Kligman develops Retin-A as an acne cream (and eventually a wrinkle cream), turning him into a multi-millionaire (Kaye).

Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will (Greger).

(1968)
Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans (Sharav, Sauter).

(1969)
Experimental drugs are tested on mentally disabled children in Milledgeville, Ga., without any institutional approval whatsoever (Sharav).

Judge Sam Steinfield's dissent in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145 marks the first time a judge has ever suggested that the Nuremberg Code be applied in American court cases (Sharav).

(1970)
Under order from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which also sponsored the Tuskegee Experiment, the free childcare program at Johns Hopkins University collects blood samples from 7,000 African-American youth, telling their parents that they are checking for anemia but actually checking for an extra Y chromosome (XYY), believed to be a biological predisposition to crime. The program director, Digamber Borganokar, does this experiment without Johns Hopkins University's permission (Greger, Merritte, et al.).

(1971)
Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The "guards" had begun to act sadistic, while the "prisoners" started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (University of New Hampshire).

An article entitled "Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States" appears in Federation Proceedings. Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division have, at this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this research may have produced HIV (Goliszek).

(1973)
An Ad Hoc Advisory Panel issues its Final Report on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, writing, "Society can no longer afford to leave the balancing of individual rights against scientific progress to the scientific community" (Sharav).

(1977)
The National Urban League holds its National Conference on Human Experimentation, stating, "We don't want to kill science but we don't want science to kill, mangle and abuse us" (Sharav).

(1978)
The CDC begins experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials in New York. Its ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men. Professor Wolf Szmuness of the Columbia University School of Public Health had made the vaccine's infective serum from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected homosexuals and then developed it in chimpanzees, the only animal susceptible to hepatitis B, leading to the theory that HIV originated in chimpanzees before being transferred over to humans via this vaccine. A few months after 1,083 homosexual men receive the vaccine, New York physicians begin noticing cases of Kaposi's sarcoma, Mycoplasma penetrans and a new strain of herpes virus among New York's homosexual community -- diseases not usually seen among young, American men, but that would later be known as common opportunistic diseases associated with AIDS (Goliszek).

(1980)
According to blood samples tested years later for HIV, 20 percent of all New York homosexual men who participated in the 1978 hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

The first AIDS case appears in San Francisco (Goliszek).

(1981)
The CDC acknowledges that a disease known as AIDS exists and confirms 26 cases of the disease -- all in previously healthy homosexuals living in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles -- again supporting the speculation that AIDS originated from the hepatitis B experiments from 1978 and 1980 (Goliszek).

(1982)
Thirty percent of the test subjects used in the CDC's hepatitis B vaccine experiment are HIV-positive by this point (Goliszek).

(1985)
A former U.S. Army sergeant tries to sue the Army for using drugs on him in without his consent or even his knowledge in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669. Justice Antonin Scalia writes the decision, clearing the U.S. military from any liability in past, present or future medical experiments without informed consent (Merritte, et al..

(1987)
Philadelphia resident Doris Jackson discovers that researchers have removed her son's brain post mortem for medical study. She later learns that the state of Pennsylvania has a doctrine of "implied consent," meaning that unless a patient signs a document stating otherwise, consent for organ removal is automatically implied (Merritte, et al.).

(1988)
(1988 - 2001) The New York City Administration for Children's Services begins allowing foster care children living in about two dozen children's homes to be used in National Institutes of Health-sponsored (NIH) experimental AIDS drug trials. These children -- totaling 465 by the program's end -- experience serious side effects, including inability to walk, diarrhea, vomiting, swollen joints and cramps. Children's home employees are unaware that they are giving the HIV-infected children experimental drugs, rather than standard AIDS treatments (New York City ACS, Doran).

(1990)
The United States sends 1.7 million members of the armed forces, 22 percent of whom are African-American, to the Persian Gulf for the Gulf War ("Desert Storm"). More than 400,000 of these soldiers are ordered to take an experimental nerve agent medication called pyridostigmine, which is later believed to be the cause of Gulf War Syndrome -- symptoms ranging from skin disorders, neurological disorders, incontinence, uncontrollable drooling and vision problems -- affecting Gulf War veterans (Goliszek; Merritte, et al.).

The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).

The FDA allows the U.S. Department of Defense to waive the Nuremberg Code and use unapproved drugs and vaccines in Operation Desert Shield (Sharav).

(1992)
Columbia University's New York State Psychiatric Institute and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine give 100 males -- mostly African-American and Hispanic, all between the ages of six and 10 and all the younger brothers of juvenile delinquents -- 10 milligrams of fenfluramine (fen-fen) per kilogram of body weight in order to test the theory that low serotonin levels are linked to violent or aggressive behavior. Parents of the participants received $125 each, including a $25 Toys 'R' Us gift certificate (Goliszek).

(1994)
President Clinton appoints the Advisory Commission on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), which finally reveals the horrific experiments conducted during the Cold War era in its ACHRE Report.

(1995)
A 19-year-old University of Rochester student named Nicole Wan dies from participating in an MIT-sponsored experiment that tests airborne pollutant chemicals on humans. The experiment pays $150 to human test subjects (Sharav).

In the Mar. 15 President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), former human subjects, including those who were used in experiments as children, give sworn testimonies stating that they were subjected to radiation experiments and/or brainwashed, hypnotized, drugged, psychologically tortured, threatened and even raped during CIA experiments. These sworn statements include:

* Christina DeNicola's statement that, in Tucson, Ariz., from 1966 to 1976, "Dr. B" performed mind control experiments using drugs, post-hypnotic injection and drama, and irradiation experiments on her neck, throat, chest and uterus. She was only four years old when the experiments started.

* Claudia Mullen's testimony that Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (of MKULTRA fame) used chemicals, radiation, hypnosis, drugs, isolation in tubs of water, sleep deprivation, electric shock, brainwashing and emotional, sexual and verbal abuse as part of mind control experiments that had the ultimate objective of turning her, who was only a child at the time, into the "perfect spy." She tells the advisory committee that researchers justified this abuse by telling her that she was serving her country "in their bold effort to fight Communism."

* Suzanne Starr's statement that "a physician, who was retired from the military, got children from the mountains of Colorado for experiments." She says she was one of those children and that she was the victim of experiments involving environmental deprivation to the point of forced psychosis, spin programming, injections, rape and frequent electroshock and mind control sessions. "I have fought self-destructive programmed messages to kill myself, and I know what a programmed message is, and I don’t act on them," she tells the advisory committee of the experiments' long-lasting effects, even in her adulthood (Goliszek).

President Clinton publicly apologizes to the thousands of people who were victims of MKULTRA and other mind-control experimental programs (Sharav).

President Clinton appoints the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

Justice Edward Greenfield of the New York State Supreme Court rules that parents do not have the right to volunteer their mentally incapacitated children for non-therapeutic medical research studies and that no mentally incapacitated person whatsoever can be used in a medical experiment without informed consent (Sharav).

(1996)
Professor Adil E. Shamoo of the University of Maryland and the organization Citizens for Responsible Care and Research sends a written testimony on the unethical use of veterans in medical research to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Governmental Affairs, stating: "This type of research is on-going nationwide in medical centers and VA hospitals supported by tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers money. These experiments are high risk and are abusive, causing not only physical and psychic harm to the most vulnerable groups but also degrading our society’s system of basic human values. Probably tens of thousands of patients are being subjected to such experiments" ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

The Department of Defense admits that Gulf War soldiers were exposed to chemical agents; however, 33 percent of all military personnel afflicted with Gulf War Syndrome never left the United States during the war, discrediting the popular mainstream belief that these symptoms are a result of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons (Merritte, et al.).

President Clinton issues a formal apology to the subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and their families (Sharav).

(1997)
In an experiment sponsored by the U.S. government, researchers withhold medical treatment from HIV-positive African-American pregnant women, giving them a placebo rather than AIDS medication (Sharav).

On Sept. 18, victims of unethical medical experiments at major U.S. research centers, including the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) testify before the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (Sharav).

(1999)
Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D. testifies on "The Unethical Use of Human Beings in High-Risk Research Experiments" before the U.S. House of Representatives' House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, alerting the House on the use of American veterans in VA Hospitals as human guinea pigs and calling for national reforms ("Testimony of Adil E. Shamoo, Ph.D.").

Doctors at the University of Pennsylvania inject 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger with an experimental gene therapy as part of an FDA-approved clinical trial. He dies four days later and his father suspects that he was not fully informed of the experiment's risk (Goliszek)

During a clinical trial investigating the effectiveness of Propulsid for infant acid reflux, nine-month-old Gage Stevens dies at Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh (Sharav).

(2000)
The U.S. Air Force and rocket maker Lockheed Martin sponsor a Loma Linda University study that pays 100 Californians $1,000 to eat a dose of perchlorate -- a toxic component of rocket fuel that causes cancer, damages the thyroid gland and hinders normal development in children and fetuses -- every day for six months. The dose eaten by the test subjects is 83 times the safe dose of perchlorate set by the State of California, which has perchlorate in some of its drinking water. This Loma Linda study is the first large-scale study to use human subjects to test the harmful effects of a water pollutant and is "inherently unethical," according to Environmental Working Group research director Richard Wiles (Goliszek, Envirnomental Working Group).

(2001)
On its website, the FDA admits that its policy to include healthy children in human experiments "has led to an increasing number of proposals for studies of safety and pharmacokinetics, including those in children who do not have the condition for which the drug is intended" (Goliszek).

In Higgins and Grimes v. Kennedy Krieger Institute The Maryland Court of Appeals makes a landmark decision regarding the use of children as test subjects, prohibiting non-therapeutic experimentation on children on the basis of "best interest of the individual child" (Sharav).

(2002)
President George W. Bush signs the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA), offering pharmaceutical companies six-month exclusivity in exchange for running clinical drug trials on children. This will of course increase the number of children used as human test subjects (Hammer Breslow).

(2003)
Two-year-old Michael Daddio of Delaware dies of congestive heart failure. After his death, his parents learn that doctors had performed an experimental surgery on him when he was five months old, rather than using the established surgical method of repairing his congenital heart defect that the parents had been told would be performed. The established procedure has a 90- to 95-percent success rate, whereas the inventor of the procedure performed on baby Daddio would later be fired from his hospital in 2004 (Willen and Evans, "Parents of Babies Who Died in Delaware Tests Weren't Warned").

(2004)
In his BBC documentary "Guinea Pig Kids" and BBC News article of the same name, reporter Jamie Doran reveals that children involved in the New York City foster care system were unwitting human subjects in experimental AIDS drug trials from 1988 to, in his belief, present times (Doran).

(2005)
In response to the BBC documentary and article "Guinea Pig Kids", the New York City Administration of Children's Services (ACS) sends out an Apr. 22 press release admitting that foster care children were used in experimental AIDS drug trials, but says that the last trial took place in 2001 and thus the trials are not continuing, as BBC reporter Jamie Doran claims. The ACS gives the extent and statistics of the experimental drug trials, based on its own records, and contracts the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct "an independent review of ACS policy and practice regarding the enrollment of HIV-positive children in foster care in clinical drug trials during the late 1980s and 1990s" (New York City ACS).

Stay away from research hospitals if you possibly can. Take it from me, they will experiment on you secretly and then send you the bill. I heard a radio interview with a guy who earns a good part of his livelihood by volunteering for medical research and he ridiculed people who volunteered for psych experiments and called them "brain sluts". I suppose "informed consent" does not pertain to people trapped and in a vulnerable position. I know it is old, but Robert Whitaker's Boston Globe series on experiments on the mentally ill is enlightening to anyone still believing that psychiatry has ethics. He concludes:

a handful of people [want]to hold researchers accountable. Chief among them is Vera Sharav, founder of Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry and Research, a New York-based group made up of families with sons and daughters who suffer from schizophrenia. For years, Sharav has labored to bring this research to light, digging deep into the scientific literature, hectoring reporters to write about it, and, in a variety of public forums, questioning researchers about its ethics. It is a record of experimentation, she said, that could only be done on the powerless. ''That is why I am so passionate about it,'' she said. ''It is extremely wrenching to see how easily a group regarded as misfits, or as not good enough, or as socially and economically useless, can be made into objects for other people's purposes.''

The following is Ms Sharav's testimony before NATIONAL BIOETHICS ADVISORY COMMISSION 1997:

MS. SHARAV: My name is Vera Hassner Sharav. I am cofounder and director of Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry and Research. It is an independent network of concerned citizens, families and patients.

The speaker before me admitted that she was an anomaly of what the correct procedures for using a human subject ought to be in psychiatric research. I am here to discuss the vast majority.

The families, in fact, that we have brought before you are victims of therapeutic neglect, betrayal of trust, and institutional deception. Their children and countless others who remain silent became unwitting martyrs for science in experiments which caused them profound harm. They went to research because they had been cast out of the health care system. They have very few options and so they looked to research instead.

Overall, neglect and poor treatment outcomes are, in fact, the norm in psychiatric treatment and in research. The two go hand in hand. But when information about the risks of relapse are withheld from patients and their families the consents obtained from them are anything but informed.

In a court deposition a senior researcher at a major VA hospital in New York stated, and I quote, "I have had occasion to review many consent forms for psychiatric studies during the late '70s and '80s. I can state that I have seen not one single consent form during that period of time that discussed any risks associated with the drug free period or the withdrawal of medication. It was the norm and practice of researchers and IRB's not to discuss any such risk in consent forms even though the risk of increased symptomatology is a possibility."

Thousands of uncomprehending patients, who lack protections, are recruited into pharmaceutical sponsored drug trials in which their welfare is sacrificed to speed up the testing process. Abrupt washouts are a way of speeding up the process. They do not have to be done that way.

They are also fair game for speculative experiments which deliberately provoke paranoid delusions, hallucinations, violent mania, disorganized thinking. University physicians are actually injecting schizophrenia patients with amphetamine, L-dopa, cocaine, apomorphine and PCP, especially at VA hospitals. They are deliberately inducing relapses so that their symptoms could be recorded. I do not know of another medical condition in which that kind of experimentation takes place.

In two recent experiments at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center fourteen patients were subjected to PCP induced relapses. It is in a published document which you have a reference to. We believe that such experiments are inhumane and unethical.

Chimpanzees are protected from such experimental abuse but disabled human beings are not. The researchers' rationale for doing these kind of studies often defies logic as well as moral responsibility.

"Because of the psychotic like symptoms shown by depressed patients during treatment with L-dopa as well as reports of such symptoms in patients with Parkinson's we decided to try the drug in schizophrenics."

We come to you to tell you that human experimentation on mentally disabled patient is out of control. There are no limits. No independent oversight. No accountability for the human casualties.

Government agencies that are entrusted to be our guardians are authorizing experiments that deliberately exacerbate incapacitating illnesses. The FDA, NIMH and Institutional Review Boards are failing to meet their public responsibility. Instead they are serving the interest of the drug industry.

Let's talk about money. No one has mentioned this in the entire morning. U.S. sales for psychotropic drugs has doubled in five years. It is now $7 billion dollars. More than 10,000 clinical testing sites are competing for human subjects. There is a race to test new drugs. Academic centers provide what industry calls a credibility bridge, prestige.

The fact is that conflicts of interest have compromised patient care and clinical practice. Psychiatrists have become partners with industry receiving thousands of dollars per patient to seed the market, that is called prescribing a drug, and to conduct drug trial studies. Academic researchers affiliated with state and VA hospitals earn as much as $20 to $30,000 per human subject in a drug trial study for Alzheimer's and schizophrenia.

Physicians are also setting up clinics and recruiting a stable of human guinea pigs whom they use repeatedly in drug trials. The FDA accepts unethically obtained data even when the human subjects are abused. They do not consider that a factor in how the data was obtained for premarketing.

The absence of protections has led to widespread violations. These are not isolated incidents. We need a national human subject welfare act that will provide all Americans with at least the protections mandated for chimpanzees. Those who profit from the drug industry claim that by providing safeguards for human subjects important research and scientific advancement will come to a halt. Well, that is nonsense. It will motivate research and industry to modify studies and the designs of the studies so that the welfare of the human subjects is not sacrificed for expediency.

Just as the Animal Welfare Act and its independent on site monitoring and oversight system did not stop genuine scientific investigation with animals neither will such scientific endeavors impede research where humans get equal protections. There would be enormous financial incentives. This enterprise is not going to come to an end.

Citizens for Responsible Care in Psychiatry and Research call for an immediate moratorium on nontherapeutic, high risk experimentation with mentally disabled persons who may be unable to comprehend or evaluate the likely or potential risks but who would suffer the consequences. Experiments which deliberately exacerbate psychotic symptoms should be absolutely prohibited.

I know this is a lengthy post, but I just want to add one more link. MEDICINE MEN HUSTLE HAPPINESS: New Cures Demand New Diseases by Robert P. Helms talks about the psych business through the eyes of some one who does lab ratting.

Manufacturing Customers

2008-12-03T13:03:00.000-08:00

Born With a Statin Deficiency?

By MARTHA ROSENBERG

When Dr. Paul Ridker of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, MA presented the results of the AstraZeneca-funded JUPITER study at the American Heart Association conference in November--JUPITER standing for The Justification for the Use of Statins in Primary Prevention--there were a lot more stenographers than skeptics in the press corps.

How could a drug company-funded study designed to show why the general population should use its drug (Crestor, or rosuvastatin) be objective? Or even newsworthy?

Especially when its lead author is co-inventor on the related patent?

And its authors list 131 financial ties to drug companies? Hello?

But the press didn't let overt conflicts of interest--COIs as pharma calls them because they're so common--ruin the story.

"AstraZeneca's Crestor Cuts Death, Heart Attack," exalted Reuters remembering the PR dictim of getting Name and Company in the headline. "Crestor Study Seen Changing Preventive Treatment!"

"Wider Cholesterol Drug Use May Save Lives," trumpeted other headlines.

"Statins For Everyone!"

"Crestor In The Water?"

Was this the same Crestor which was vilified in a Lancet editorial three months after its 2003 US approval as "inadequately investigated"?

Named as one of the top five most dangerous drugs by the FDA's Dr. David "Vioxx" Graham on Capitol Hill in 2004?

Petitioned for recall by the Washington D.C. based Public Citizen?

Found worthless against chronic heart failure just one month earlier in Lancet?

In the feeder frenzy to cover the self-engineered drug breakthrough, where was press mention of another American Heart Association finding about Crestor in its journal Circulation in 2005? [111:3051-3057]

That Crestor "was significantly more likely to be associated with the composite end point of rhabdomyolysis, proteinuria, nephropathy, or renal failure," than other drugs?

Where was mention of the FDA warning about rhabdomyolysis--the muscle disease that did Bayer's Baycol in--that was added to Crestor in 2005 after a patient death--along with warnings to the physician about Crestor use in Asian patients, people with severe kidney disease and patients taking cyclosporine?

Oops.

But while the gee whiz press focused on the JUPITER study's startling results--the Crestor group had a 54 percent reduction in heart attacks, 48 percent reduction in strokes and 20 percent reduction in death compared to placebo--especially in light of the fact that the study group was free of heart disease and high cholesterol, most doctors wouldn't drink the AstraZeneca Kool-Aid.

The study's 17,802 enrollees may have had normal levels of the bad LDL cholesterol but some were "walking vasculopaths," with abnormal C-reactive protein levels [CRP] which indicate inflammation in the body said Dr. Bernadine Healy, health editor for U.S. News & World Report.

"As a result, the JUPITER trial was riddled with obesity, high blood pressure, prediabetes, and genes predisposing to heart disease," said Healy. "Almost 3,000 enrollees were smokers, a big time CRP elevator, and only 10 percent took aspirin, an inexpensive preventive medicine that protects against both heart disease and stroke. (Aspirin also lowers CRP.) Other study patients were really healthy, free of any known risk factors and yet had elevated CRP for no obvious reason."

While the press bought AstraZeneca's contrivance that the JUPITER study was so conclusive it was ended early, many of the 470 doctors who posted online comments after the study in the New England Journal of Medicine (Nov. 20, 2008) said you ended the trial WHEN?

"It is well established that RCTs [randomized controlled trials] stopped early overestimate benefits significantly," wrote a physician from Rochester, MN.

"It is shocking that this trial was terminated 50% through, based on a small absolute benefit, with real questions about long term risk," said a poster from the Public Health Law Program, LSU Law Center.

"There is no justification for stopping the follow-up, even if the triallists felt it was unethical to recruit new patients," wrote a physician from Yorkshire, UK. "Congratulations to AstraZeneca for selling the results to the uncritical lay media. I feel sorry for all the family doctors who will be pestered by patients for some time to come."

Doctors also balked at the study's ipso facto preference for a pill over lifestyle changes like diet and exercise--including the well known Dr. Dean Ornish of Preventive Medicine Research Institute who noted the nation spent $20 billion on cholesterol-lowering drugs last year.

While cardiologists were soft on the study--except one who assailed the Western "pandemic food addiction and the mirage of immortality in a bottle of pills"--many other doctors detected disease mongering behind JUPITER of the sort that sold HRT and Vioxx to anyone over 50.

Even a medical student wasn't impressed.

"I don't think risking the patient's life by giving him statins is a correct procedure. I would be giving him/her benefits for a disease which has not been diagnosed yet and increasing the odds of developing another disease (Diabetes)," she wrote.

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist on the Evanston Roundtable.

Nutrition and Cancer

2008-10-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

Dopamine stimulation causes withdrawal

2008-10-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

A New State of Mind

The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner, two neuroscientists at McGill University, decided to implant an electrode deep into the center of a rat's brain. The precise placement of the electrode was largely happenstance: At the time the geography of the mind remained a mystery. But Olds and Milner got lucky. They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain dense with dopamine neurons and involved with the processing of pleasurable rewards, like food and sex.

Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. After they ran a small current into the wire, so that the NAcc was continually excited, the scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything else. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just cower in the corner of their cage, transfixed by their bliss. Within days all of the animals had perished. They had died of thirst.

It took several decades of painstaking research, but neuroscientists eventually discovered that the rats were suffering from an excess of dopamine. The stimulation of the brain triggered a massive release of the neurotransmitter, which overwhelmed the rodents with ecstasy. In humans addictive drugs work the same way: A crack addict who has just gotten a fix is no different from a rat in electrical rapture. This, then, became the dopaminergic cliché — it was the chemical explanation for sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

But that view of the neurotransmitter was vastly oversimplified. What wasn't yet clear was that dopamine is also a profoundly important source of information. It doesn't merely let us take pleasure in the world; it allows us to understand the world.

I have yet to see anyone "cower with bliss" and it is funny that it took 30 or so years to make the research fit the supposition (cliche is right). Speaking of rats and drugs, the Rat Park experiments were very interesting.

Edison

2008-10-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

I am cleaning out some files on my computer and sticking them on my blogs and this was interesting but I don't know where it came from:

Sketching a fuller picture of Thomas Edison than the usual sanitized version, Gardner sums up his appraisal of the national hero by stating that his "beliefs and habits were those of a crackpot and a bum. Rats lived happy and undisturbed in his laboratory; he often slept in his clothes, because he believed that changing or taking them off induced insomnia; he thought that Richard Wagner was Jewish; he was a disastrous husband and father; he all but starved himself to death because he believed that food poisons the intestines; his own company in Europe coined the cable name 'Dungyard' for him."

Some jokes

2008-10-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

A baby born in the hospital weighed ten pounds.
The odd thing about him was his body weighed
five pounds and his balls weighed five pounds.

All the nurses and even the doctor didn't know
what to do with him.

Then, the chief surgeon walked in and said,
"Well it's obvious that you should put him
into a mental institution."'

'Why,'' asked the head nurse.

"Take a look at him," replied the chief surgeon,
He's obviously half nuts."

A guy had been feeling down for so long that he finally decided to seek the aid of a psychiatrist. He went to the shrink's office, laid on the couch, spilled his guts then waited for the profound wisdom of the psychiatrist to make him feel better.

The psychiatrist asked the man a few questions, took some notes, then sat thinking in silence for a few minutes with a puzzled look on his face.

Suddenly, the shrink looked up with an expression of delight and said, "Um, I think your problem is low self-esteem. It is very common among losers."

`````````

"The trouble is," said the entertainer to the psychiatrist, "that I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't tell jokes, I can't act, I can't play an instrument or juggle or do magic tricks or do anything!"
"Then why don't you give up show business?"
"I can't - I'm a star!"

````````````

A man walks into the psychiatrists office wearing nothing but Saran Wrap.

The doctor said, "I can clearly see you're nuts."

Bullying

2008-10-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

He who fights against monsters must beware lest he become one himself - Nietzsche

It may sometimes be hard to define good, but evil has its unmistakable odor. Every child knows what pain is. Therefore, each time we deliberately inflict pain on another we know what we are doing. We are doing evil.- Amoz Oz

Studies show that children and adolescents who are victims of schoolyard bullying face an increased risk of developing depression, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and are at increased risk of schizophrenia according to one New Zealand study. Dr John Read from the University of Auckland presented research at a psychiatrists' conference in Canberra, showing there are similar changes in the brains of abused children and adult schizophrenics. He says his research shows up to 60 per cent of women with schizophrenia may have been abused as children.

Bullying is the most common form of violence in our society. Bullying behavior is behind all child abuse, domestic violence, workplace violence, hate crimes, and road rage. It travels from the strongest to the weakest and it does not dissolve into nothingness. Men bully their female partners, women bully children, older children bully younger children and younger children bully their pets leading to a "vortex of violence". Young children, who are at the bottom of this ladder absorb it, accumulate it and wait until they are strong enough to erupt. It is well documented that many violent criminals were victims of child abuse.

The same vulnerable feelings are felt in most bullying. Marilee Strong described her reaction to parental abuse in A Bright Red Scream: "In some ways, an abused child faces terror worse than anything a soldier experiences on the field of battle. She lives in a world of continual and unpredictable danger and may, with good reason, fear for her life. Yet she has no gun to protect her, no squad to back her up, no training for her combat role. She is completely alone, completely powerless, completely at the mercy of her parent's will, she cannot fight back, cannot escape. She is trapped."

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and many of the perpetrators of mass violence exemplify the incomprehensible injustice of retaliation against bullying by attacking innocents at random. Between 1992 and 1999 there were over 250 violent deaths in schools that involved multiple victims and in virtually every school shooting, bullying had been a factor. Deadly assaults do not occur from one brief encounter. Like other forms of child abuse, bullying pits a weak, single individual against a strong, dominating aggressive foe who chronically victimizes his/her prey. Many of the bullied are in survival mode of just getting through each day hoping they'll endure that day.

The bully or bullies dehumanize their victim and conduct a deliberate, hurtful, repeated assault on their prey's esteem. Charles "Andy" Williams who shot 15 people, killing two at Santana High School, Santee, California was constantly called "faggot" and "geek" at school. Bullies stole his cigarettes, wallet and skateboard repeatedly. His peers constantly ridiculed him. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold who made Columbine infamous, were harassed, bullied and put down on a daily basis for years. Every day when Harris and Klebold came to school, they were met by a gauntlet of students that harassed them in the hallways and cafeteria and called them "dirt bags," "dirt balls," or "homos" and other names. They were also hassled by having orange juice poured on their trench coats so they would have to wear the sticky stuff all day. Frequently the football players would physically assault them by throwing a body block on them banging them into the lockers or the wall.

Everyone said we should fear the loners. Loner children should be protected precisely because they think differently and become our inventors, our artists, our lyricists, writers, poets, comedians and yes, sometimes our "nuts". Society benefits if only these children can live to adulthood without committing suicide or becoming mentally ill for loners live under constant stress as prime bully bait. The pressure to conform is enormous to teenagers. To witness the phenomenon, walk the halls of your high school and tell me you don't find the uniformity spooky. You, too, will feel like you have entered a cult because everyone dresses the same, combs their hair similarly and talks in the same clichés. Naturally, any independent thinker, anyone who doesn't dress regulation, anyone you maintains a free identity will be made into an outcast. The hated students, unfortunately, have no choice on their outcast status, they have been sentenced by their peers to relentless ridicule. Classmates create a prison without walls and concur, "We have judged you and find you unfit for our society."

The social ostracism these students experienced forced them to seek help in some cases. The psychiatric community who basically rejects talk therapy in favor of psychotropic prescriptions brands the victim "chemically imbalanced" and promises that the proper dulling medication will help them adjust. Some would say that the aggressive bullies should have been referred for psychiatric evaluation but it was Harris who was prescribed Luvox, an antidepressant and Kip Kinkel, (who killed his parents and two students in Oregon) who was on Prozac. Just maybe we are medicating the wrong segment of society when cruelty is ignored or rewarded and victims have to have their brains altered.

Our society has a tendency to blame the victim for his troubles. I remember reading of a young German student who said the Jews were responsible for the holocaust because they allowed themselves to be victimized. We have made the term "victim mentality" a derogatory term and privileged people sneer at anyone who doesn't admit that he is to blame for his own troubles or asks the courts or government to provide redress. We don't decry the "bully mentality" for this society praises winning at all costs. Conformity is the golden rule of the bully mentality and "love it or leave it" is their prayer. Any laws passed to give any minority equal access to America are a threat to the bully mentality. Whenever minorities want handicapped access, anti-discrimination laws, or "hate crime" legislation, the bullies cry "foul" and claim the minority is getting extra advantage. The bullies ridicule fairness by mocking it as "politically correct" and not once admitting it is morally correct in a civilized society to protect the vulnerable from the cruel and the greedy.

Old but interesting article

2008-10-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

Teaching Old Drugs New Tricks
Pharmaceutical companies won't study whether cheap old drugs work better than expensive new ones. But NIH should.
By Emily Yoffe
Posted Wednesday, June 5, 2002

Suppose a researcher discovered that some cheap, long-available drug could treat a devastating disease. Patients wouldn't need exorbitantly priced new drugs, and they might be able to avoid surgery. Insurers and hospitals would save millions by adopting the economical new treatment.

It would be great news for everyone—except pharmaceutical companies. They don't care if old, off-patent drugs have novel uses. Their profits depend on new, expensive, patented drugs. They're not about to undertake costly testing to prove that a discount drug whose patent has expired works as well a pricey new one.

Since the pharmaceutical companies are the economic engine behind drug development, and since there is no incentive for them to find new uses for old drugs, such research is no one's mission. A Wall Street Journal story last month nicely illustrated the problem, describing the inability of Dr. G. Umberto Meduri to get sufficient backing for a major study to prove what his small, promising studies have indicated: Low doses of common steroids can help prevent death by sepsis, an often deadly bloodstream infection. The steroids, no longer under patent, cost about $50 per course of treatment. Eli Lilly & Co., the Journal points out, has just released a new sepsis drug that costs $7,000 per course. And Lilly is spending millions to promote its drug.

This would seem like a job for the National Institutes of Health. It's in the United States' financial interest—as well as public health interest—to see whether steroids work on sepsis. If they're effective, taxpayers could save millions in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. But so far Meduri has failed to get federal funding. A spokesman for NIH says the vast majority of applicants do not get funded, and it's true that even the best system is going to leave some worthy studies undone. But Meduri's case and others suggest that novel uses of existing compounds—therapies that could improve lives at little cost—often have a hard time getting attention at NIH, especially if they contradict prevailing medical opinion.

NIH's main mission is—and should be—basic biomedical research, understanding how the human body functions at a molecular level. NIH is also a center for clinical research, but clinical trials receive only one-sixth the funding that basic science does, frustrating investigators who say clinical research deserves to be treated with more urgency.

For example, promising findings that the amino acid homocysteine might be as good as, or possibly better than, cholesterol at predicting heart disease languished for more than a decade because of lack of funding. Drug companies avoided studying homocysteine for an obvious reason: The treatment for elevated homocysteine is folic acid and B vitamins, which cost next to nothing. No pharmaceutical company wanted to test whether lowering homocysteine is as important as lowering cholesterol. Cholesterol-lowering drugs, after all, earn billions for the pharmaceutical companies.

Again, NIH was the obvious place to turn, but it wasn't interested. According to a New York Times article on the controversy, NIH was long considered "a kind of ground zero for the cholesterol camp." Dr. Kilmer McCully, the doctor credited with discovering the homocysteine connection, lost his funding and his position at Harvard Medical School for advocating a line of inquiry so contrary to accepted medical belief. Today, there is powerful evidence that homocysteine levels are a marker not only for heart disease, but also for stroke and Alzheimer's. Yet, even today, as an NIH Web site points out, "Clinical intervention trials are needed [emphasis added] to determine whether supplementation with vitamin B6, folic acid, or vitamin B12 can help protect you against developing coronary heart disease."

When a pair of Australian researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, presented findings in the early 1980s showing that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, not stress and excess stomach acid, caused most peptic ulcers, they were derided by the medical establishment. At the time, the drug companies were introducing new acid reducers, the staggeringly profitable drugs now available over the counter as Tagamet and Zantac. As the Journal points out, drug companies are often the primary suppliers of information about drugs to physicians. So for years doctors gave little credence to the bacterial infection theory of ulcers. Such a theory would mean that patients could be cured with a short-course of antibiotics, rather than merely receive symptomatic relief from long-term treatment with costly acid reducers. It wasn't until 1994 that the NIH convened a panel that accepted the infection theory.

This is not to say NIH rarely does clinical studies; it does many. Nor does NIH always fail to notice promising uses for old compounds. Right now NIH is recruiting patients for a massive study on whether selenium and vitamin E can prevent prostate cancer, and it's even investigating whether the spice turmeric can prevent colon cancer. (NIH is doing another kind of research drug companies won't: studying the long-term effects of the most popular prescription drugs. Click here for more.)

Finding significant, unexpected uses for drugs has a long history. Some major discoveries in the treatment of mental illness resulted from seeing surprising benefits in mood or behavior in patients who were treated with drugs for purely physical ailments. At the recently concluded meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the New York Times wrote, "There were particularly promising reports involving new uses for old drugs."

NIH's budget has doubled in the last five years to $27 billion. Now that it's so flush with cash, it's time for the NIH to search more systematically for potential lifesavers that are already on the pharmacy shelves.

For Conspiracy Fans

2008-09-28T05:38:00.000-07:00

Plan to Make Big Pharma King For The Next Century

Artificial sweeteners and ADHD

2008-08-25T05:32:00.000-07:00

This is the movie Sweet Poison about the dangers of aspartame. I really wonder if there is a correlation between the consumption of diet drinks during the pregnancies of mothers who have ADHD, ADD, and autistic kids. Seems to me that this problem ballooned about the same time this chemical appeared. How does one run a study of such things?

This movie talks about the increases in brain cancer (among other diseases) since the introduction of aspartame. Makes sense it would affect the brain in vitro.

Labelling

2008-08-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

Psychiatry pranked

How Psychiatry Helps in the War on Terrorism

2008-08-18T07:00:00.001-07:00

Drug Resistant Infections

2008-08-10T15:43:00.000-07:00

Superbugs; The new generation of resistant infections is almost impossible to treat by Jerome Groopman

Before the development of antibiotics, the threat of infection was urgent: until 1936, pneumonia was the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, and amputation was sometimes the only cure for infected wounds. The introduction of sulfa drugs, in the nineteen-thirties, and penicillin, in the nineteen-forties, suddenly made many bacterial infections curable. As a result, doctors prescribed the drugs widely—often for sore throats, sinus congestion, and coughs that were due not to bacteria but to viruses. In response, bacteria quickly developed resistance to the most common antibiotics. The public assumed that the pharmaceutical industry and researchers in academic hospitals would continue to identify effective new treatments, and for many years they did. In the nineteen-eighties, a class of drugs called carbapenems was developed to combat gram-negative organisms like Klebsiella, Pseudomonas, and Acinetobacter. “They were, at the time, thought to be drugs of last resort, because they had activity against a whole variety of multiply-resistant gram-negative bacteria that were already floating around,” Moellering said. Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down. Inevitably, mutant, resistant microbes flourished, and even the carbapenems’ effectiveness waned.

Now microbes are appearing far outside their environmental niches. Acinetobacter thrives in warm, humid climates, like Honduras, as well as in parts of Iraq, and is normally found in soil. An article published in the military magazine Proceedings in February reported that more than two hundred and fifty patients at U.S. military hospitals were infected with a highly resistant strain of Acinetobacter between 2003 and 2005, with seven deaths as of June, 2006, linked to “Acinetobacter-related complications.” In 2004, about thirty per cent of all patients returning from Iraq and Afghanistan tested positive for the bacteria. “It’s a big problem, and it’s contaminated the evacuation facilities in Germany and a lot of the V.A. hospitals in the United States where these soldiers have been brought,”

The practice of “clinical tourism,” in which patients travel long distances for more advanced or more affordable medical centers, may introduce resistant microbes into hospitals where they had not existed before.

Meanwhile, antibiotic use in agricultural industries has grown rapidly. “Seventy per cent of the antibiotics administered in America end up in agriculture,” Michael Pollan, a professor of journalism at Berkeley and the author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” told me. “The drugs are not used to cure sick animals but to prevent them from getting sick, because we crowd them together under filthy circumstances. These are perfect environments for disease. And we also have found, for reasons that I don’t think we entirely understand, that administering low levels of antibiotics to animals speeds their growth.” The theory is that by killing intestinal bacteria the competition for energy is reduced, so that the animal absorbs more energy from the food and therefore grows faster. The Food and Drug Administration, which is often criticized for its lack of attention to the risks of widespread use of antibiotics, offers recommended, non-binding guidelines for these drugs but has rarely withdrawn approval for their application. A spokesman for the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the F.D.A. told me that the center “believes that prudent drug-use principles are essential to the control of antimicrobial resistance.” A study by David L. Smith, Jonathan Dushoff, and J. Glenn Morris, published by PLoS Medicine, from the Public Library of Science, in 2005, noted that the transmission of resistant bacteria from animal to human populations is difficult to measure, but that “antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (ARB) are found in the air and soil around farms, in surface and ground water, in wild-animal populations, and on retail meat and poultry. ARB are carried into the kitchen on contaminated meat and poultry, where other foods are cross-contaminated because of common unsafe handling practices.” The researchers developed a mathematical model that suggested that the impact of the transmission of these bacteria from agriculture may be more significant than that of hospital transmissions. “The problem is that we have created the perfect environment in which to breed superbugs that are antibiotic-resistant,” Pollan told me. “We’ve created a petri dish in our factory farms for the evolution of dangerous pathogens.”

A recent assessment of progress in the field, from U.C.L.A., concluded, “FDA approval of new antibacterial agents decreased by 56 per cent over the past 20 years (1998-2002 vs. 1983-1987),” noting that, in the researchers’ projection of future development only six of the five hundred and six drugs currently being developed were new antibacterial agents. Drug companies are looking for blockbuster therapies that must be taken daily for decades, drugs like Lipitor, for high cholesterol, or Zyprexa, for psychiatric disorders, used by millions of people and generating many billions of dollars each year. Antibiotics are used to treat infections, and are therefore prescribed only for days or weeks. (The exception is the use of antibiotics in livestock, which is both a profit-driver and a potential cause of antibiotic resistance.)

Everyone Hallucinates

2008-08-06T05:28:00.000-07:00

The vanishing ball illusion is one of the most basic tricks a magician can learn: a ball is thrown repeatedly into the air and caught. Then, on the final throw, it disappears in midair. In fact, the magician has merely mimed the last throw, following the ball's imagined upward trajectory with his eyes while keeping it hidden in his hand.

But if the technique is easily explained, the phenomenon itself is not. If done right, the trick actually makes observers see the ball rising into the air on the last toss and vanishing at its apex. As Rensink points out, this is something more powerful than merely getting someone to look in the wrong direction - it's a demonstration of how easy it is to nudge the brain into the realm of actual hallucination. And cognitive scientists still don't know exactly what's causing it to happen.

How Magicians Control Your Mind

Selling Prevention

2008-07-25T06:34:00.000-07:00

Protecting Bones from Drugs that Protect Bones By MARTHA ROSENBERG

Like gastro-esophageal reflux and bipolar disease, osteopenia began to inflict millions when a drug to treat it came on patent.

Osteopenia or the risk of developing osteoporosis was concocted as a disease at a World Health Organization (WHO) osteoporosis conference in Rome in 1992 sponsored by two drug companies and a drug-company foundation writes Susan Kelleher in the Seattle Times.

Using the bone density measurements or "T scores" of a 30-year-old woman as a standard, the new condition, osteopenia, had "boundaries so broad they include more than half of all women over 50," writes Kelleher. And it didn't hurt that 10,000 bone density measuring machines appeared in doctors' offices by 1999 to detect the new disease--only 750 existed previously--many owned and financed by Merck whose anti bone-thinning drug Fosamax came online in 1995.

No wonder doctor visits for thinning bones increased by five million from 1994 to 2003 according to the Associated Press.

Of course selling "prevention" to at risk patients is a pharma goldmine.

It keep patients on meds for decades through fear, alarmist marketing and after-this-because-of-this reasoning--since a patient doesn't know if she would have gotten the disease anyway.

So even when reports of Fosamax-related jaw problems called osteonecrosis surfaced--1,000 cases have been documented--and even when a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year found Fosamax doubled women's risk of irregular heart beat which can cause clots and strokes, few doubted its primary action of protecting women's bones.

But now, like hormone replacement therapy which also exploited women's fear of aging and social marginalization, Fosamax appears to cause the conditions it's supposed to prevent.

Since 2006, articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Orthopedic Trauma, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Aging Clinical and Experimental Research, Hong Kong Medical Journal, Geriatrics and Bone have suggested the anti-bone turnover action of bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax can in some cases cause fractures.

Oops.

Sure bisphosphonates prevent bone loss that is caused by the process of bone turnover or remodeling. But they also fossilize and petrify a bone so it breaks spontaneously and with minimal trauma--like chalk--scientists now say. Nor will it heal properly.

Thighbones of patients on bisphosphonates have "simply snapped while they were walking or standing," reported the New York Times in July following "weeks or months of unexplained aching."

Like other fast-tracked-to-Wall-Street drugs which are effectively "tested" on the first users, adverse reports about bisphosphonates came from patients and practitioners long before the FDA or manufacturers.

Bisphosphonate patients documented excruciating pain from Fosamax since 2001 and GlaxoSmithKline's Boniva since 2006 on askapatient.com, many calling the drugs "poison" and saying they were forced into wheelchairs.

But only in March did the FDA alert healthcare professionals to the, "severe, sometimes incapacitating musculoskeletal pain" bisphosphonate drugs could cause in their patients and caution them to consider whether musculoskeletal pain "might be caused by the drug" not the bone condition.

Not only is the pain bisphosphonate patients report "not in their heads"--imagine 1,257 men on askapatient.com saying their doc dismissed their constant pain and symptomology--it is emblematic of what is really going on.

"There is actually bone death occurring," Dr. Phuli Cohan told Mallika Marshall, MD Medical Reporter for Boston's WBZ-TV News in May. "People don't want to believe that this is happening, but it is a side effect of the medicine," she said.

Dr. David Hunter of the New England Baptist Hospital concurs that bisphosphonates can cause "Dead Bone Syndrome" and patients should have a "drug holiday to allow bone cells to rejuvenate," reports Marshall.

Even drug reps on industry chatroom cafepharma are skeptical about bisphosphonates.

"They over suppress the bone and 'may' cause sub trochanter fractures," wrote one anonymous poster on a thread called "Is Boniva dead" sparked by a rumor that Boniva pitchwoman Sally Fields had fallen and broken a bone. "It's the next hot button."

Nor do bisphosphonates exit the body quickly when patients quit according to a 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association--but remain for years.

(Patients "need not take costly bone-building drugs such as Fosamax for life to reap the medicine's protective benefits," was the News & Observer's upbeat interpretation of the drug's tenacity.)

If bisphosphonates prove to be the next hormone replacement therapy--causing the conditions they were supposed to treat--the osteopenia epidemic will no doubt clear up.

Especially since the patents are running out.

Martha Rosenberg is staff cartoonist on the Evanston Roundtable. She can be reached at mrosenberg@evmark.org

A new use for Viagra

2008-07-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

After a trial on less than 100 women, the makers of Viagra say it is great for restoring libido on women being treated for depression - now that is what I call an unbiased study. Seems it doesn't work for "normal" women, but the mentals will take anything!!!

Prozac - a new defense

2008-07-07T10:09:00.000-07:00

Head fake
How Prozac sent the science of depression in the wrong direction
By Jonah Lehrer
July 6, 2008

One of the first cracks in the chemical hypothesis of depression came from a phenomenon known as the "Prozac lag." Antidepressants increase the amount of serotonin in the brain within hours, but the beneficial effects are not usually felt for weeks.

This led neuroscientists to wonder if something besides serotonin might be responsible. Duman, for instance, began to study a class of proteins known as trophic factors, which help neurons grow and survive. Trophe is Greek for nourishment; what sunlight and water do for trees, trophic factors do for brain cells. Numerous studies had shown that chronic stress damages the brain by suppressing the release of trophic factors. In a series of influential papers published earlier this decade, Duman demonstrated that the same destructive hallmark is seen in depression, so that our neurons are deprived of what they need.

"The mental illness occurs when these stress mechanisms in the brain spiral out of control," he says.

Once that happens, the brain begins to shut itself down, suppressing all but the most essential upkeep. Not only do neurons stop growing, but the brain seems to stop creating new cells. A 2003 study, led by Columbia University neuroscientist Rene Hen, found that when the birth of new brain cells was blocked with low doses of radiation in "depressed" rats, antidepressants stopped working.

A recent study by Italian researchers, published in the journal Science, helps to reveal another mechanism by which antidepressants reverse the damage of depression. The scientists were interested in seeing if fluoxetine, the active ingredient of Prozac, could increase the potential of brain cells in the adult rat. They studied animals with severe cases of "lazy eye," a condition characterized by poor vision in one eye due to underdevelopment of the visual cortex. The scientists showed that fluoxetine gave brain cells the ability to take on new roles and form new connections, which erased the symptoms of the disorder.

"The drug appears to make brain cells quite young," says Jose Vettencourt, a lead author. The scientists are currently repeating the experiment with humans, raising the possibility that fluoxetine will soon be used to treat lazy eye and related conditions.

In fact, many scientists are now paying increased attention to the frequently neglected symptoms of people suffering from depression, which include problems with learning and memory and sensory deficits for smell and taste. Other researchers are studying the ways in which depression interferes with basic bodily processes, such as sleeping, sex drive, and weight control. Like the paralyzing sadness, which remains the most obvious manifestation of the mental illness, these symptoms are also byproducts of a brain that's literally withering away.

Read the whole article here.

Veteran's PTSD

2008-06-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Some sources estimate that up to 20% of returning veterans are suffering from some sort of PTSD. Heard on NPR that the psychiatric community is going to give them free counseling. Before you stand up and cheer - each is going to volunteer 1 hour a week - that should cure em /sarcasm.

Reminds me of the joke about a Jewish lady who goes to a wedding reception and constantly complains about the food and then says "and there was so little of it."

Risperdal goes generic soon

2008-05-29T06:23:00.000-07:00

Drugmakers’ Me-Too Medicines Face Tough Customers:Big Pharma’s pitches for new and improved versions of old drugs aren’t working the magic they used to.

Posted by Scott Hensley

Johnson & Johnson still hopes for better sales of Invega (AP)
New York psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman has heard Johnson & Johnson’s spiel for schizophrenia medicine Invega, a derivative of the company’s blockbuster Risperdal, that was launched last year. And he’s not buying it.

Invega is “basically a me-too drug, and the company hasn’t done the studies that would be required to really distinguish it,” Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University’s medical school told Peter Loftus of Dow Jones Newswires.

Dan Carlat, a psychiatrist and a tough critic of Invega, wrote that J&J’s “marketing team apparently missed the fact that the word in the English language that sounds most like “Invega” is “inveigle,” meaning “to entice, lure, or ensnare by flattery or artful talk or inducements.’ ” He asked doctors: “Will you be doing your patients a favor by taking the plunge? Or will you simply be giving them the same wine in a fancier bottle?”

The psychiatrists’ skepticism, Dow Jones reports, is shared broadly by health insurers and points to a rising challenge for drug makers: a tougher market for follow-on drugs. Cheap generics abound to treat a broad assortment of illnesses these days. What’s the point, the critics ask, of paying more for drugs that are at best only slight improvements over tried and true medicines available at bargain prices?

The tougher landscape is bad news for J&J. Risperdal goes generic in the U.S. next month. For the four months ending in April, U.S. sales of Invega were $85 million compared with $810 million for the oral form of Risperdal, according to data from Wolters Kluwer Health.

Following this article in the Wall Street Journal is a lively discussion between (what I call) realists and what I can only assume are investors.

A little something personal

2008-05-19T12:46:00.000-07:00

I so wanted to get off medication as I am beginning to show the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease. I showed my psychiatrist the problems with my quivering tongue and she suggested tongue exercises! (And they think we should respect them). On the Bonkers Institute site, Ben Hansen has this accurate quote (forget who said it and too lazy to look it up): "Psychiatry is to medicine as Astrology is to Astronomy."

I have to have gall bladder surgery on Friday and I am hoping they give me too much anesthetic and I can exit this cruel world before I am a jerking fool who cannot think of enough words to string together a sentence. I would never commit suicide, but I would welcome some quick, painless death...the last fifth of life is just a saga of deterioration anyway. I am not depressed, just being realistic...hell, I even have a new goal in life (proves I am not hopeless). Why just today it occurred to me that I should start a non-profit organization for people who like creeping Charlie ground cover instead of grass lawns - hardy, grows short and doesn't need mowing or watering, covers solidly, cute purple bloom. Have you ever seen the money that directors of non-profits make?

Weight-loss drugs may harm developing brain

2008-05-19T12:34:00.000-07:00

Weight-loss drugs may harm developing brain: study| Markets News | Reuters

Sanofi-Aventis' weight-loss pill rimonabant, also known as Zimulti and sold under the brand name Acomplia in Europe, is the first in this new class of drugs. A U.S. expert panel rejected it last June because of fears it might trigger suicidal thoughts.

Other drugmakers, including Merck & Co Inc, are working on similar drugs.

A study last month of the drug in obese heart patients found more than 40 percent of patients who took the drug developed psychiatric problems.

But last month the drugmaker Sanofi said it still believes Acomplia can be a winner and reiterated plans to submit the drug worldwide as a treatment for type 2 diabetes in 2009.

I often wondered if there is a relationship between the ballooning autism rate and diet drinks made with aspartame. Dr. Janet Starr Hull wrote a book called Sweet Poison about it.

Also stumbled on this this today:

The federal government's new advice to doctors for helping smokers quit recommends the drug Chantix, which has recently been linked with depression and suicidal behavior.

The new guidelines mention the psychiatric risks but also say the popular Pfizer Inc. (PFE) drug is the most effective at helping people get off cigarettes. The guidelines mention other options, too, and highly recommend combining counseling and medication. But doctors are encouraged to talk to all smokers who want to quit about trying medication...Another issue with the quit-smoking guidelines, released this week by the U.S. Public Health Service, is the lead author's past connections with Pfizer. Dr. Michael Fiore, an expert on smoking and health issues, was a consultant to the maker of Chantix. But he said he cut those ties in 2005.

2008-05-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

Labelling

2008-05-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

You better Hope Your Counselor Likes You.

Since I moved and had another breakdown, I have a new psychiatrist. Disappointing to say the least. I have tried to go off medications but after about a month of pleasant living, I become manic with all that involves. The only way to get prescription renewal is to go through the motions and pretend that THEY want to help me. What a waste of time and money to have my opinions ignored yet again.

Comfortably Numb

2008-03-07T12:05:00.000-08:00

Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation Book Notes lecture.

News Roundup

2008-03-06T07:15:00.000-08:00

No good drugs for dementia

A warning about cases of delirium and unusual behavior had been listed previously on Roche's drug, Tamiflu. That language was strengthened to say some of cases were fatal.

Risperdal should have been available as a generic in 2007.

Two British Articles on Antidepressants

2008-02-27T11:47:00.000-08:00

Antidepressant drugs don't work – official study
They are among the biggest-selling drugs of all time, the "happiness pills" that supposedly lift the moods of those who suffer depression and are taken by millions of people in the UK every year.
But one of the largest studies of modern antidepressant drugs has found that they have no clinically significant effect. In other words, they don't work.
In the study, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of all 47 clinical trials, published and unpublished, submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in the US, made in support of licensing applications for six of the best known antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, Seroxat – which is made by GlaxoSmithKline – and Efexor made by Wyeth. The results showed the drugs were effective only in a very small group of the most extremely depressed.

Two drugs were excluded from the study because of incomplete data. A third drug, chemical name nafazodone, has been withdrawn from the market because of side-effects.
Professor Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull, who led the study published in the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Medicine , said the data submitted to the FDA would also have been submitted to the licensing authorities in Britain and Europe. It showed the drugs produced a "very small" improvement compared with placebo of two points on the 51-point Hamilton depression scale.
That was sufficient to grant the drugs a licence but did not meet the minimum three-point difference required by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) to establish "clinical" significance. Yet Nice approved the drugs for use on the NHS in the UK because it only had access to the published trials, which showed a larger effect.

The drug industry's long and ignoble history of secrecy
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Discovering, testing and bringing a new drug to market can take more than a decade and cost as much as £500m. Over the past 30 years, as the costs have mounted, so have the pressures to protect new chemical agents which could become potential blockbusters.

Secrecy became the pharmaceutical industry's watchword as it sought to control publication of trials and even manipulate results. Cancer drugs introduced in the 1990s claimed to offer major benefits which later turned out to be more apparent than real. Evidence published in The Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 38 per cent of independent studies of the drugs reached unfavourable conclusions about them, compared with just 5 per cent of studies funded by the pharmaceutical industry.

In 2004, UK researchers commissioned by Nice to develop guidelines for prescribing antidepressant drugs to children tried to obtain unpublished trials from the drug companies. They were refused. They then contacted the individual researchers who had worked on the trials. Only then did a picture emerge of increased risk of attempted suicide, and a lack of efficacy. Nice concluded by banning the drugs for under-18s with the exception of Prozac.

Yesterday's report suggesting that modern antidepressants offer no significant clinical benefit over placebo has been dismissed by the drug industry as "just one study" which should not be allowed to undermine the wealth of research showing that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants are effective.
But that is to miss the point. The Hull University researchers have demonstrated how partial access to research can give a distorted view of a drug. The non-disclosure of data on the SSRIs has raised doubts about the trustworthiness of all research on antidepressants.

We should be relieved that the licensing authorities have an absolute right to see all trial data, positive and negative, before approving a drug. But, bizarrely, Nice, with the responsibility for deciding which drugs should be used by the NHS, only gets what the drug companies agree to give it. The Health Select Committee has called for action to remedy this omission. Ministers must respond.

Famous Psychologist R W Firestone defines madness

2008-02-15T11:00:00.000-08:00

Graffiti for the wall of your room

2008-02-12T15:33:00.000-08:00

"The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression." - Brian Sutton Smith

Sadness leads to Shopping

2008-02-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

According to this study sadness leads to more shopping. I was reading an AARP article about collecting and the author also talked about this phenomenon -funny how one man's addiction to mustard jars started because his baseball team lost. No wonder we are not only a consumerist society, but also the most depressed if pharmaceutical records can be trusted. In a vicious circle, buying leads to debt which leads to sadness which leads to more purchases.

Overprescribing

2008-02-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

The death of Heath Ledger points to a common problem in the psych doctor's bag. I can name lots of people that are on 4, 6 or even more drugs. Disgraceful.

Antipsychotics and Aggression

2008-02-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

Second Thoughts About Antipsychotics for Aggression by Shirley S. Wang

A recent study that found antipsychotics weren’t any better than sugar pills in reducing aggressive behavior among people with low IQs fanned the controversy over the broad use of antipsychotic drugs to treat patients with problems other than psychosis.
It wasn’t that the drugs failed outright. Haldol and Risperdal, both from J&J, reduced aggression in patients by 65% and 58%, respectively. But placebos cut aggressive behavior by 79%, the study published in the Lancet showed.
Before working at a large psychiatric hospital last year, I didn’t realize just how commonly antipsychotics are prescribed for a variety of psychiatric disorders. On one inpatient unit, I heard Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa being prescribed so often for symptoms such as anxiety that I remember feeling surprised when I finally learned that it was an antipsychotic.

Free Gifts for Doctors

2008-01-25T08:22:00.000-08:00

This was from Minnesota Public Radio (thanks to Denise). Duluth-based SMDC Health System removed over 18,000 branded items from their clinics and it took 20 shopping carts to haul it all away.

Although doctors are considered to be above-average intelligence, they are human and influenced same as anyone else and want to reciprocate for a gift. Since prescribing specific brands does not cost the doctor personally, he will likely want to please someone who was generous to him - same techniques used by the lobbyists on Capital Hill.

In the field of influence and persuasion, Dr. Robert Cialdini, the most cited social psychologist in the world today, defines six “weapons of influence”: Reciprocation (people tend to return a favor), Commitment and Consistency (if people commit, verbally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment), Social Proof (people will do things that they see other people are doing) Authority (people will tend to obey authority figures, even if they are asked to perform objectionable acts), Liking (people are easily persuaded by other people that they like) and Scarcity (perceived scarcity will generate demand).

I remember seeing another video in which a pharm rep said that they would size up doctors to see which approach to use. They classified them as analytical (give them research stats), drivers (wanted to be in control, so salesman stays subservient) or amiable (people pleasers).

FDA to require suicide studies

2008-01-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

U.S. requiring suicide studies in drug trials

The drug agency's concerns are consistent with a growing body of research confirming that behavior is heavily influenced not only by genes but also by seemingly innocuous changes in body chemistry. Drugs not reaching the brain were once thought to be largely free of mental effects.
"One lesson from pharmacology is that you can see effects on emotion and cognition without the drug entering the brain if a drug leads to peripheral changes in" other chemicals that enter the brain, said Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Some critics say that the agency's new-found focus on psychiatric side effects is long overdue.
"The list of drugs that causes psychiatric problems is a very long one," said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizen's health research group.
Medicines to treat acne, hypertension, high cholesterol, swelling, heartburn, pain, bacterial infections and insomnia can all cause psychiatric problems, effects that were discovered in most cases after the drugs were approved and used in millions of patients.
Some drugs cause depression so often that doctors prescribe antidepressants prophylactically with them.

Weasel Words

2008-01-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

Great news that the depression drugs are under attack because the producers buried uncomplimentary studies. Also very interesting is this article entitled Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature. The chart with old quotes from researchers is especially disheartening for us who hope for changes and improvements in treatment.

As the news about the skewing of depression studies and the over-hype of statins has hit the main media, one can only hope the antipsychotics also will come under scrutiny.

I subscribe to a dictionary site that sends you a new word every day. It includes a definition and the origin. (OK, I admit I like some very boring things). This week, one of the words was "weasel words" which made me think of the whole psychiatric game.

Weasel Words: Instead of just saying outright that jobs are going to be cut, the head of the company has taken to using weasel words like "corporate restructuring."

Some people believe that weasels can suck the insides out of an egg without damaging the shell. An egg thus weasel-treated would look fine on the outside, but it would actually be empty and useless. We don't know if weasels can really do that, but the belief that they could caused people to start using "weasel word" to refer to any term intended to give the impression that everything is fine when the speaker is really trying to avoid answering a question, telling the truth, or taking the blame for something.

For instance, this is what the literature says about risperdal. For your pleasure, I have underlined the weasel words.
From the drugs own literature:

Risperidone (Jansen's RISPERDAL®).
How does RISPERDAL work?
Symptoms of schizophrenia are thought to be caused by imbalances of chemicals in the brain. These chemicals are called dopamine and serotonin. Exactly how RISPERDAL works is unknown. However, it seems to readjust the balance of dopamine and serotonin. This may help relieve symptoms of anxiety, depression, suspiciousness and delusions.

Fluoride and your brain

2008-01-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

Scientific Study Finds Fluoride Horror Stories Factual By Paul Joseph Watson Scientific American has just published a report on flouride that is supposedly very critical. Unfortunately they require a subscription to read the entire article but I did find this synopsis:

The Scientific American study "Concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid -- the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism."

The report also notes that "a series of epidemiological studies in China have associated high fluoride exposures with lower IQ."

"Epidemiological studies and tests on lab animals suggest that high fluoride exposure increases the risk of bone fracture, especially in vulnerable populations such as the elderly and diabetics," writes Fagin.

Fagin interviewed Steven Levy, director of the Iowa Fluoride Study which tracked about 700 Iowa children for sixteen years. Nine-year-old "Iowa children who lived in communities where the water was fluoridated were 50 percent more likely to have mild fluorosis (damaged tooth development)... than [nine-year-old] children living in nonfluoridated areas of the state," writes Fagin.

In 2005, a study conducted at the Harvard School of Dental Health found that fluoride in tap water directly contributes to causing bone cancer in young boys.

FACTS ABOUT FLUORIDE
- Fluoride is a waste by-product of the fertilizer and aluminum industry and it's also a Part II Poison under the UK Poisons Act 1972.
- Fluoride is one of the basic ingredients in both PROZAC (FLUoxetene Hydrochloride) and Sarin nerve gas (Isopropyl-Methyl-Phosphoryl FLUoride).
- USAF Major George R. Jordan testified before Un-American Activity committees of Congress in the 1950's that in his post as U.S.-Soviet liaison officer, the Soviets openly admitted to "Using the fluoride in the water supplies in their concentration camps, to make the prisoners stupid, docile, and subservient."

And then there is this article about Alzheimers and the alarming statistics that compares American and European susceptibilities. Alzheimer's in America:
The Aluminum-Phosphate Fertilizer Connection
by Lynn Landes

Americans are losing their minds to Alzheimer's disease. It's an epidemic. And it's not typical of what's going on in the rest of the world.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 18 million people with Alzheimer's. Over 4 1/2 million Americans have the disease. We account for 25% of all Alzheimer's cases, even though we represent only 4.6% of the world's population. Europe is experiencing half our rate of disease. For Americans over 85 years of age, 50% are thought to have Alzheimer’s.

In 1998 Julie Varner and two colleagues published research on the effects of aluminum-fluoride and sodium-fluoride on the nervous system of rats. They concluded, "Chronic administration of aluminum-fluoride and sodium-fluoride in the drinking water of rats resulted in distinct morphological alterations of the brain, including the effects on neurons and cerebrovasculature." In layman's terms, it looked like fluoride and aluminum could cause Alzheimer's.

That was not a definitive study, but they may have been onto something. Aluminum is in our drinking water, foods, and many consumer products. Adding fluoride to drinking water in the U.S. started in the 1950's. America's drinking water is now over 60% fluoridated. Fluoride appears in many processed foods and beverages made with fluoridated water. Keep in mind, Europe has half our rate of Alzheimer’s. They don't fluoridate their water supplies, but they do use fluoride supplements and dental products. Is there a connection?

And then there is this from another anti-flouride site

It is now known - thanks to the meticulous research of Dr. Jennifer Luke from the University of Surrey in England - that the pineal gland is the primary target of fluoride accumulation within the body.

The pineal gland is where melatonin is produced and is also closely related to dreams and the psychotic state. Most things are not simple, but one has to wonder why America has more autism, alzheimers and mental illness than other places in the civilized world. Ironic that the health promoters tell you to drink 8 glasses of water every day.

A Short History of Medicine

2008-01-15T03:19:00.000-08:00

I have an earache:
2000 BC Here, eat this root.
1000 AD That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 AD That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1940 AD That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1985 AD That pill is carcinogenic. Here, take this antibiotic.
2000 AD That antibiotic ruins your immunity. Here, eat this root.

Killer Personalities

2008-01-12T04:45:00.000-08:00

Charles Atkins, a psychiatrist who writes crime novels, describes mental illnesses that work well in crime fiction. And you thought the psychiatrists were sympathetic when you described your horrible childhood or why you are scared to leave the house. This one is just mining for plots.

Interesting view on the WHO schizophrenia study

2008-01-11T04:02:00.000-08:00

Washington Post reporter Shankar Vedantam wrote that family support determines recovery. The anti-psychiatry movement uses the World Health Organization findings to say that drugs don't work, while Mr. Vedantam says that the difference lies in the way schizophrenics are treated.

Decades of research have supported the WHO findings, but they have met with stony silence in the United States, in part because anti-psychiatry groups have argued erroneously that the studies prove that drugs and doctors are useless. Most U.S. psychiatrists see schizophrenia as an organic brain disorder, whose origins and outcome depend on genes and brain chemistry. They acknowledge the psychosocial aspects of disease, but the challenges of connecting patients with jobs, schooling and social networks are neglected -- often because they fall outside the bounds of traditional medicine. Drug manufacturers, too, are focused elsewhere. "Pharmaceutical companies, which control the scientific production of research at universities, are not interested in saying, 'Social factors are more important than my drug,' " said Jose Bertolote, a WHO psychiatrist. "I'm not against the use of medication, but it's a question of imbalance."

Thara argues that patient-doctor relationships in India are fundamentally different from those in America: The relationships may be paternalistic, but the benefits are lower costs and less fragmentation. On an annual budget of $67,000, SCARF treats 1,200 patients, dispenses free drugs, runs three residential facilities for 150 patients and offers vocational training each day for 100 patients.

Social connectedness for patients is seen as so important that the psychiatrists tell families to secretly give money to employers so that patients can be given fake jobs, work regular hours and have the satisfaction of getting "paid" -- practices that would be unethical, even illegal, in the United States.

Prince George's County outside Washington was one of the sites of the pioneering WHO study -- William Carpenter helped treat about 90 schizophrenia patients at three hospitals. That experience brought home to him the fact that medications primarily control patients' delusions and hallucinations, not the "negative" symptoms that cause patients to disappear into silent, inner worlds.

"The bias has always been in the direction of reducing psychosis," said Carpenter, director of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. "Psychosis is public and bothersome. . . . Negative symptoms bother you if it's your child, but it doesn't create a public disturbance."

Anti-psychotic drugs that help quell the outward symptoms may actually exacerbate social withdrawal, he said: "While we treat one part of the illness, we potentially complicate another part of the illness."

New medicines are being aimed at the negative symptoms. But Carpenter and other experts said it is clear that drugs cannot replace social supports.

When people are presented with ambiguous information, they often interpret it to support their established beliefs. When people are presented with unambiguous information that contradicts their beliefs, they tend to pay close attention to it, scrutinize it, and either invent a way of discounting it as unreliable, or redefine it to be less damaging than it really is.

The Medicated Child

2008-01-10T04:36:00.000-08:00

In case you missed the Frontline program on childhood bipolar diagnosis, the program can be watched here. I really thought it was slanted, but judge for yourself.

Why Drug Progress is so Slow

2008-01-02T13:31:00.001-08:00

A Slight Chemical Imbalance

2008-01-02T04:25:00.000-08:00

Pilfered from Bent Objects Blogspot

On Being Sane in Insane Places

2007-12-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

In 1972, a psychologist named David Rosenhan convinced some of his friends to fake their way into psychiatric wards across the US. When Rosenhan's experiment On Being Sane in Insane Places, was published in Science, it outraged the world of psychiatry. It is very interesting reading, especially the sections on depersonalization and also analysis of the time that is actually spent with the patients by doctors and nurses. I suggest you read the whole thing as it is only 13 pages long and written in easy language. The only one of the participants that was not classed schizophrenic was the one that checked into an expensive private hospital.

According to the Wikipedia article on Rosenhan's experiment several other psychiatry bias experiments were later conducted:

Maurice K. Temerlin split 25 psychiatrists into two groups and had them listen to an actor portraying a character of normal mental health. One group was told that the actor "was a very interesting man because he looked neurotic, but actually was quite psychotic" while the other was told nothing. Sixty percent of the former group diagnosed psychoses, most often schizophrenia, while none of the control group did so.

Loring and Powell gave 290 psychiatrists a transcript of a patient interview and told half of them that the patients were black and the other half white; they concluded of the results that "Clinicians appear to ascribe violence, suspiciousness, and dangerousness to black clients even though the case studies are the same as the case studies for the white clients".

Lauren Slater says in her 2004 book Opening Skinner's Box that she repeated Rosenhan's study, by presenting at the emergency rooms of different hospitals with a single auditory hallucination. She writes that she was not admitted to any of them but was instead given prescriptions for antipsychotics and antidepressants, and was also occasionally diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She makes the connection between her being repeatedly diagnosed as such and the vast majority of pseudopatients in the original experiment being diagnosed as schizophrenic; she suggests that certain mental illnesses become "fashionable" over time.

Help for Depression

2007-12-12T07:44:00.000-08:00

Top 4 Depression Hacks

Brainswitching "Depression exists in the emotional part of the brain. Brainswitching uses basic mental exercises to switch the neuronal activity from the emotional part of the brain (the subcortex) to the thinking part of the brain (the neocortex) which does not have the capacity for depression.
Here's an example of Brainswitching that you can try for yourself. Lets say you find yourself being depressed, instead of thinking "I am so down and depressed" make yourself busy with some trivial logical exercises or games. At such a time you can play games that involve logical thinking (chess, soduku, online puzzles, etc) or simply close your eyes and in your mind start singing your favorite song with full concentration. Refuse to think that you are depressed.

Concentrating your mind on some thought or song will block the cognitive awareness of the depression going on in the subcortex, the emotional part of your brain. This technique will increase the neuronal activity in the neocortex and decrease it in the subcortex, thus correcting the chemical imbalance that feeds. depression."

The other three suggestions are
Omega 3 Fatty Acid
Exercise
Sleep regulation

All I can say is Wow

2007-11-26T04:39:00.000-08:00

A website that has everything - well organized, well designed and stuffed with useful information is Psych Activist. Can you tell that I am envious, but in the nicest way.

This is so weird

2007-11-09T05:53:00.000-08:00

This site described me exactly. It is rather amazing and rather refreshing to find that you are not alone and other people think the same as you, even if it is not a comfortable skin.

Sleep and Depression

2007-11-08T11:33:00.001-08:00

Helping You Discover What Works for You

2007-11-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

Here is a selection of items from the author's main pages of ideas, stories and questions that relate to issues of the past, your personal history.

How to stop worrying

2007-11-07T07:44:00.000-08:00

Great advice from Anxiety Culture for do-it-yourself therapy.

Really Interesting I thought

2007-11-06T05:38:00.000-08:00

Everyone wants the public to force change - how about the medical field?

2007-11-05T11:07:00.000-08:00

Why psychiatrists won't change with a hat tip to Mark via Rayne's Blog comments.

Shell Shock and Harry Farr

2007-11-04T04:27:00.001-08:00

Memory

2007-11-03T08:21:00.001-07:00

Another Drug Rep

2007-10-31T12:42:00.001-07:00

Drug reps are hired for their looks and personality, not their knowledge. Lots of people are influenced by a charming personality instead of common sense. That is why advertising succeeds and the earth is drowning in useless garbage. Manipulating people pays better than informing them.

The Problem with Experts

2007-10-31T11:23:00.000-07:00

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance. - Orville Wright

Education can be a wonderful thing as long as it is not just pepetuating false assumptions.

Dr Ioannidis began his study by reviewing 49 research articles printed in widely read medical journals between 1990 and 2003. Each of these articles had been cited by other scientists in their own papers 1,000 times or more. However, 14 of them—almost a third—were later refuted by other work. Having established the reality of his point, he then designed a mathematical model that tried to take into account and quantify sources of error. Again, these are well known in the field.

One is an unsophisticated reliance on “statistical significance”. To qualify a result as statistically significant, the probability that it is the result of pure coincidence should be smaler than 1:20. But, as Dr Ioannidis points out, adhering to this standard means that simply examining 20 different hypotheses at random is likely to give you one statistically significant result. In fields where thousands of possibilities have to be examined, such as the search for genes that contribute to a particular disease, many seemingly meaningful results are bound to be wrong just by chance.

In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance.

When Dr Ioannidis ran the numbers through a simulation, his model predicted that even a large, well-designed study with little researcher bias has only an 85% chance of being right. An underpowered, poorly performed drug trial with researcher bias has but a 17% chance of producing true conclusions. Overall, the model predicts that more than 50% of all published research is probably wrong.

- Read whole article here.

Because the educated professionals have invested a lot of time and money in studying current thinking, they are reluctant to discard any of it. This is despite the fact that modern medicine really has very few accomplishments to take credit for and diseases that have been around for centuries will probably be attacking future generations.

This is an incomplete list of incurable diseases:
Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia
Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Acquired Immune Defficiency Syndrome (AIDS) see also HIV
Adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD)
Alzheimer disease
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS,Lou Gehrig's disease)
Aspartylglucosaminuria
Asthma
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
Autism
Avian Influenza
B-Mannosidosis
Batten disease (Juvenile Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis)
Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE, "Mad Cow" disease)
Bipolar disorder (Manic-depression)
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)
Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML)
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) see also Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Kuru
Common Cold
chicken pox aka Herpes Zoster aka varicella-zoster aka Shingles
Currarino Triad
Cystic Fibrosis
Cystinosis
Dementia
Diabetes
Dysmyelogenic leukodystrophy (DMD a.k.a. Alexander disease)
Ebola
Emphysema (C.O.P.D.)
Farber disease
Fatal Familial Insomnia
Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva
Flu
Fucosidosis
Galactosialidosis (Goldberg syndrome)
Gaucher disease
GM1 Gangliodsidosis
Hairy cell leukemia
Herpes Zoster aka varicella-zoster aka chicken pox
Hopeless Astrocytoma (Brain Cancer)
Hurler syndrome (includes Hurler-Scheie)
Hunter syndrome
Infantile Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis
Infertility
Krabbe disease
Kuru see Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease
Lissencephaly
Lymphocytic Lymphomas
Hodgkin Lymphoma
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma
Small lymphocytic lymphoma
Maroteaux-Lamy
Measles
Metachromatic Leukodystrophy (MLD)
Morquio A
Mucolipidosis II (I-Cell Disease)
Mucolipidosis IV
Multiple sclerosis (MS)
Niemann-Pick disease, Types A and B
Polio
Pompe disease
Prosaposin
Progeria
Pseudomyxoma peritonei
Psoriasis
Salla disease
Sandhoff disease
Sanfilippo A
Scheie syndrome
Schindler disease
Schizophrenia
Sialidosis (Mucolipidosis I)
Sly syndrome
Spreading Adenocarcinoma
Spreading Melanoma
Takayasu's arteritis (Pulseless Disease)
Tay-Sachs disease
Tinnitus
Wolman disease

They are Safer on the Streets than at Home

2007-10-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

Tales of tampered candy and others like it are based more on our unreasonable collective fears, fueled by the media and hearsay, than on factual information. The fear surrounding tainted Halloween treats goes back for decades and may have originally stemmed from an incident in 1964. A New York housewife, annoyed that many of the trick-or-treaters were too old to be asking for free candy, decided to make up packages of inedible treats to give the teens. The packages contained steel wool, dog biscuits and ant buttons. To her credit, she did clearly label the ant buttons "POISON" and cautioned the teenagers of her little prank. No one was injured, but the potential for harm was there, so the District Attorney prosecuted and she plead guilty to endangering children.
National panic about candy tampering didn’t reach an epidemic proportion however, until the New York Times ran an article in 1970 claiming that "Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness." (NY Times, 10/28/70, pg. 56) The article went on to give specific and horrifying examples of potential tamperings. Since the Times article, the media has kept that fear alive. Even "Dear Abby" got in on the action by reminding parents of the danger that "…somebody’s child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade."
The truth about the dangers might not have been discovered, were it not for California researchers Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, who studied national crime data going back to 1958. In their 1985 published study, they found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering. Most of them turned out to be mistaken or fraudulent. Out of these 76 reports, only three incidents of children dying were reported to be tainted candy cases. In one case, the father of a Houston boy gave him arsenic laced candy to collect on a large insurance claim. In the second case, a boy stumbled across his uncle’s stash of heroin, ingested some of the drug and died. This boy’s family tried to hide the facts by sprinkling heroin over some of his other candy, but the family soon confessed to their cover-up. And in the third case, a Los Angeles girl had a fatal seizure that was first blamed on tainted candy, but later discovered to be the result of a congenital heart condition.

http://thefolklorist.com/pressreleases/dangers%20in%20the%20candy.htm

Contrast that with this:

According to the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, in 1995 about 2.9 million children in the United States were reported as abused or neglected to government agencies that investigate child abuse. Investigators substantiated abuse or neglect for more than 1 million of the children reported. Among substantiated cases, 52 percent involved physical or emotional neglect, 24.5 percent involved physical abuse, 12.6 percent involved sexual abuse, 4.5 percent involved emotional abuse, and 17.3 percent involved other abuse, such as educational neglect or abandonment. Some children experienced multiple forms of abuse.
Many researchers believe that statistics based on official reports do not accurately reflect the prevalence of child abuse. Definitions of maltreatment vary from state to state and among agencies, making such statistics unreliable. Professionals who interact with children—such as teachers, day-care workers, pediatricians, and police officers—may fail to recognize or report abuse. In addition, acts of abuse usually occur in the privacy of a family’s home and often go unreported. Surveys of families, another way of estimating abuse, indicate that 2.3 percent of children in the United States—or about 1.5 million children—experience abusive violence each year.
The U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect estimates that 2000 children under the age of 18 are killed by parents or caretakers each year. Annually, more children under the age of four die from abuse and neglect than from falls, choking on food, drowning, fires, or motor vehicle accidents. More than 18,000 children suffer permanent disabilities from abuse or neglect annually.

http://www.ancillaryresources.mrpete.net/about81.html

Sleep Deprivation

2007-10-25T10:34:00.000-07:00

It sickens me that not only physical torture but also psychological torture of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation (the hoods), and isolation are used by our government. To everyone who has gone for long stretches without sleeping with all the loss of judgement that goes with it, this article in Psyciatric Times is an interesting one as you are not alone:

When sleep deprivation becomes great enough, the effects mimic those of psychosis. The failure of the scientific world to recognize this is due to some extent to the folklore that has grown up around the sleepless marathon of high school student Randy Gardner in 1964.

To gain an entry into the Guiness Book of World Records, he remained awake for 264 hours (11 days). Summaries of this case usually report that Gardner suffered no hallucinations, no paranoia or other negative mood changes, and that his mental, motor and sensory abilities were quite good throughout the entire episode. This conclusion is so widespread that it has now become a stock "fact" presented in virtually any psychology or psychiatry book that has a chapter on sleep.

This conclusion seems to be based on two items of information. The first was the observation that there were no obvious lasting physical or mental problems encountered by Gardner when he began to sleep again. The second was based upon observations of researcher William Dement (Dement, 1992), who interviewed Gardner on Day 10 of the experiment. He reported that he took Gardner to a restaurant and then played pinball with him, noting that Gardner played the game well and even won. Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego, who was called in by Gardner's worried parents to monitor his condition, tells a quite different story (Ross, 1965). Gardner's symptoms that Ross reported included:

Day 2: Difficulty focusing eyes and signs of astereognosis (difficulty recognizing objects only by touch).

Day 3: Moodiness, some signs of ataxia (inability to repeat simple tongue twisters).

Day 4: Irritability and uncooperative attitude, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating. Gardner's first hallucination was that a street sign was a person, followed by a delusional episode in which he imagined that he was a famous black football player.

Day 5: More hallucinations (e.g., seeing a path extending from the room in front of him down through a quiet forest). These were sometimes described as "hypnagogic reveries" since Gardner recognized, at least after a short while, that the visions were illusionary in nature.

Day 6: Speech slowing and difficulty naming common objects.

Day 7 and 8: Irritability, speech slurring and increased memory lapses.

Day 9: Episodes of fragmented thinking; frequently beginning, but not finishing, his sentences.

Day 10: Paranoia focused on a radio show host who Gardner felt was trying to make him appear foolish because he ws having difficulty remembering some details about his vigil.

Day 11: Expressionless appearance, speech slurred and without intonation; had to be encouraged to talk to get him to respond at all. His attention span was very short and his mental abilities were diminished. In a serial sevens test, where the respondent starts with the number 100 and proceeds downward by subtracting seven each time, Gardner got back to 65 (only five subtractions) and then stopped. When asked why he had stopped he claimed that he couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing.

In many respects Gardner's symptoms were similar to those experienced by a New York disk jockey, Peter Tripp, who endured a 200-hour sleepless marathon to raise money for the March of Dimes. During the course of his ordeal his thoughts became increasingly distorted and there were marked periods of irrationality. By the end of four days he could not successfully execute simple tests requiring focused attention. In addition, he began to have hallucinations and distorted visual perceptions. At one point Tripp became quite upset when he thought that the spots on a table were insects. He thought that there were spiders crawling around the booth and even once complained that they had spun cobwebs on his shoes.

He showed the same increasing moodiness and paranoia that Gardner did. On his last day, a neurologist was called to examine Tripp before sending him home. When Tripp looked up at this doctor in his dark, old-fashioned suit, he had the delusion that the doctor was really an undertaker who was about to bury him alive. Overtaken with fear, he let loose a scream and bolted for the door. Half-dressed, Tripp ran down the hall with doctors and psychologists in pursuit. He could no longer distinguish the difference between reality and nightmare.

This same pattern of mental deterioration that mimicks psychotic symptoms appears in several more systematic studies of sleep deprivation and extreme sleep debt. Thus, prolonged sleep deprivation does lead to the appearance of serious mental symptoms. In addition, even moderate amounts of sleep deprivation can lead to losses in mental efficiency that can threaten public and personal safety.

William Dement is regarded as the expert on sleeping and he was so wrong on this aspect. One has to question his reliability when he says that schizophrenics have the same sleep and REM patterns as normals.

The Crying Game: Male vs Female

2007-10-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

latest study mentioned on Yahoo is that crying men and crying women are viewed very differently. I actually get quite a kick out of all the studies that try to sound profound when they are just commenting on obvious things. Anyway here is a snippet:

In a recently published study at Penn State, researchers sought to explore differing perceptions of crying in men and women, presenting their 284 subjects with a series of hypothetical vignettes.

What they found is that reactions depended on the type of crying, and who was doing it. A moist eye was viewed much more positively than open crying, and males got the most positive responses.

"Women are not making it up when they say they're damned if they do, damned if they don't," said Stephanie Shields, the psychology professor who conducted the study. "If you don't express any emotion, you're seen as not human, like Mr. Spock on 'Star Trek,'" she said. "But too much crying, or the wrong kind, and you're labeled as overemotional, out of control, and possibly irrational."

That comes as no surprise to Suzyn Waldman, a well-known broadcaster of Yankee games on New York's WCBS Radio.

Earlier this month, she choked up for several seconds on live radio after the Yankees had just been eliminated from the playoffs. She was describing the scene as manager Joe Torre's coaches choked up themselves, watching him at the podium and foreseeing the end of an era.

Her tearful report quickly became an Internet hit, and she was mocked far and wide, especially on radio, with her voice, for example, played over the song "Big Girls Don't Cry."

"This turned into something pretty ugly," Waldman said in an interview. "I don't throw around the word 'sexist,' but this was as sexist as it gets."

She also wrote a passionate editorial in Newsday defending her brief display of emotion. "While the anger and sarcasm that I can and do display is all right with people," she wrote, "the occasional tear is scary and is ridiculed. Why?"

While Waldman notes that female anger in the clubhouse, is OK — it makes her seem tough, she says — one recent study indicates that perceptions of anger, too, differ according to gender.

"When men express anger they gain status, but when women express anger they lose status," Yale social psychologist Victoria Brescoll, who conducted three experiments on how people perceive female anger, said in an interview. Her study is to be published in the journal Psychological Science.

Sleep

2007-10-23T04:13:00.000-07:00

Many psychiatric disorders, "particularly ones involving emotions, seem to be linked with abnormal sleep," he added. "Traditionally people mostly thought the psychiatric disorders were contributing to the sleep abnormalities, but of course it could be the other way around. If we can find out which parts of sleep are most key to emotional stability, we already have a good range of drugs that can push and pull at these kinds of sleep and maybe help treat certain kinds of psychiatric conditions."

Read the whole article here

It has also been found that melatonin levels drop 75% suddenly just before puberty which seems very significant considering schizophrenia usually appears at about the same time in formerly healthy kids and their parents often talk about how they wander around nights.

When you factor in other victims of sleeplessness due to hypervigilance (child abuse and PTSD for example) one really has to question whether all the psych treatments are taking credit for a side effect - sleepiness. Actually the blockbuster drugs for erectile dysfunction were just a side effect of a drug designed for hypertension, ecstasy was developed to prevent excess bleeding, there are lots of examples of the side effects becoming more important than the original function.

Medication Nation

2007-10-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

Medication Nation by Mark White Too fat, too thin, too sad, too happy...Whatever the problem Biotech is developing a vaccine or a pill to cure us. Mark White examines the consequences of a world where all our worries can be medicated away. Here is just some of a really interesting article:

Swiss biotech company Cytos has 25 research programs underway, including its ImmunodrugTM nicotine vaccine CYT002-NicQb, along with vaccines for chronic diseases including obesity, hypertension, allergy, psoriasis and rheumatoid arthritis. The company was granted a US patent in early 2005 for vaccines against different drugs of abuse, and hopes to release its nicotine vaccine in 2010. The vaccine antibodies prevent dopamine, the chemical that leads to a feeling of pleasure, from flooding the brain. They have a half-life of 50 to 100 days, meaning the response could be a boosted by a further injection. The rewards are huge: Decision Resources estimated the 'stop smoking' market in America alone will be $1.5bn by 2007, and as China and India become richer, with more people smoking, eventually more people will want to stop smoking too.

Cystos' obesity vaccine works on a similar principle with an antibody against ghrelin, a small protein that regulates appetite. If you inject extra ghrelin into people it makes them hungrier. Fat people who lose weight develop extra ghrelin, leading to yo-yo dieting. The theory is that by stopping the uptake of ghrelin it will be easier to stick to a diet. Cytos is to be running trials with 112 obese volunteers on a six month treatment of the vaccine or a placebo, and at the same time counselling them about healthy eating and encouraging exercise. While obesity is a leading cause of preventable death in rich countries, it is also, in every sense, a growing problem, with rich nations becoming fatter and fatter, and less and less happy about it. A successful vaccine would be worth billions.

The military are in on the act, naturally, sponsoring research into drugs that will keep their soldiers awake without the jittery, glittery rush of adrenaline that follows amphetamine use. And then there are mood-enhancing drugs to combat the rise of depression, a disorder that the World Health Organisation estimates will be the biggest health problem in the industrialised world by 2020.

'Tomorrow's biotechnology offers us the chance to enrich our emotional, intellectual and, yes, spiritual capacities,' says David Pearce, a leading transhumanist philosopher (transhumanists favour using science and technology to overcome human limitations). I think there's an overriding moral urgency to eradicating suffering. This ethical goal eclipses everything else.'

There is an alternative view, explored by philosopher Carl Elliott in his essay Pursued by happiness and beaten senseless: Prozac and the American Dream, that looks at alienation in societies - the 'mismatch between the way you are living a life and the structure of meaning that tells you how to live a life... it makes some sense (though one could contest this) to say that sometimes a person should be alienated - that given certain circumstances, alienation is the proper response. Some external circumstances call for alienation.' He gives the example of Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. He may be happier on Prozac and his psychic well-being would be improved. But his predicament is not just a matter of the wellbeing of his mental health, but how he is living his life. If someone's life is making them sick, then you can make them well by cither changing how they live their life or by making them fit in with what made them sick in the first place.

The real kicker is the class of experimental drugs developed by Cortex Pharmaceuticals, known as ampakines, that boost the levels of glutamate in the brain - a neurotransmitter implicated in the consolidation of memory. The drug's obvious therapeutic use is to treat people with Alzheimer's or dementia, but why stop there? A report in New Scientist earlier this year described the effects of the Cortex Pharmaceuticals ampakine CX717 on 16 healthy male volunteers at the University of Surrrey who were kept awake all night and then put through tests. Even the smallest doses of the drug improved their performance, and the more they took the more alert they became and the better their cognitive performance. The ampakine users remained alert and with none of the jitters associated with caffeine or amphetamines.

All technologies have mission creep and unintended consequences. Chatterjee dismisses concern about drug safety with the blithe phrase 'in general, newer medications will continue to be safer', despite little evidence to that end - and recent evidence with fen-phen, Vioxx and' the hiding of negative SSRI drug data by Big Pharma pointing in the other direction. The debate is framed in such a way as to make cosmetic neurology sound like an extension of evolution, when it's about as natural as a GM tomato containing a fish gene. This kind of technological arrogance is what's dooming the ecosphere, not saving it. 'I'm not prepared to say they can't be a good thing,' wrote Elliott, by email. 'They may well be. But I guess my feeling is that while the benefits are obvious, the possible drawbacks are not, and need to be thought about more carefully. There are also a lot of people out there with a financial interest in hyping the benefits and downplaying the risks.'

This is Pretty Funny

2007-10-19T04:22:00.000-07:00

This guy has a simple cure for all mental illness - a cuff to the side of the head. Even more absurd is the fact that one psychiatrist also recommended slapping mentally ill people.

In the 1940s and 50s, Dr. John Nathaniel Rosen developed a technique for treating schizophrenic patients that involved slapping them. In 1971, he received the Man of the Year Award from the American Academy of Psychotherapy according to this history of treatments.

Big Price Jump

2007-10-07T04:30:00.000-07:00

Drug's price up more than $21,000
The hike for H.P. Acthar, which treats a rare childhood disorder, has sparked debate over prescription costs.

There's one drug most doctors turn to first when babies have catastrophic seizures: a natural hormone sold under the name H.P. Acthar. It's the gold standard to stop seizures that can ruin a child's chance for a normal life.
On Aug. 27, the lone maker of that drug raised the price from $1,650 a vial to more than $23,000 a vial, sending the price for an average patient to $100,000 or more.
Experts say it is not uncommon for new drugs, especially for those that treat rare diseases, to cost more than $100,000 a year. The high price is needed, economists say, so the firm can be encouraged to enter the field.

What sets apart Acthar is that it is an old drug. The compound (Adrenocorticotropic hormone) was first synthesized in the 1940s by Armour & Co., the canned-meat firm, which harvested it from pigs' pituitary glands.

The drug, used for years to treat Infantile Spasms, was made by Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc. and then by its successor, Aventis. It was never a big seller, and the former owner nearly stopped making it in the mid-1990s - only to see it brought back after a storm of pediatricians complained that there was no substitute.

Risperdal and pituitary tumors

2007-10-01T07:55:00.001-07:00

Antipsychotic Drug May Be Linked to Pituitary Tumors

No wonder people put on weight if it affects the pituitary gland significantly.

This was Interesting

2007-10-01T05:22:00.000-07:00

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are 18 million people with Alzheimer's. Over 4 1/2 million Americans have the disease. We account for 25% of all Alzheimer's cases, even though we represent only 4.6% of the world's population. Europe is experiencing half our rate of disease. For Americans over 85 years of age, 50% are thought to have Alzheimer’s

In 1998 Julie Varner and two colleagues published research on the effects of aluminum-fluoride and sodium-fluoride on the nervous system of rats. They concluded, "Chronic administration of aluminum-fluoride and sodium-fluoride in the drinking water of rats resulted in distinct morphological alterations of the brain, including the effects on neurons and cerebrovasculature." In layman's terms, it looked like fluoride and aluminum could cause Alzheimer's.

That was not a definitive study, but they may have been onto something. Aluminum is in our drinking water, foods, and many consumer products. Adding fluoride to drinking water in the U.S. started in the 1950's. America's drinking water is now over 60% fluoridated. Fluoride appears in many processed foods and beverages made with fluoridated water. Keep in mind, Europe has half our rate of Alzheimer’s. They don't fluoridate their water supplies, but they do use fluoride supplements and dental products.

Read the whole article Alzheimer's in America.

FDA is Paper Tiger

2007-09-30T04:41:00.000-07:00

Hampered by the lack of a comprehensive catalog of clinical trials, the FDA is unable to even identify all trials, the estimated 350,000 study sites and the institutional review boards that oversee each study to ensure they meet scientific, ethical and legal obligations, the report says.

Those limitations hinder the FDA's ability to ensure participants are protected from unreasonable risks, Levinson said.

The FDA relies on just 200 inspectors to police human studies of drugs and devices. The inspections they perform focus more on ensuring the accuracy of trial data than on verifying the measures put in place to protect the study participants, the investigation found.

Even when inspectors do turn up serious problems, their findings are frequently downgraded by senior officials and almost never followed by inspections to see whether the issues have been resolved, according to the report. In the case of the FDA's drug office, 68 percent of inspector recommendations that the agency take regulatory action, typically in the form of a warning letter, were downgraded.

Drug trials go unwatched, study says

What's In a Name?

2007-09-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

This is from When Naming a Drug, It is an Inexact Science

The name can make the difference between whether a drug becomes a blockbuster or a flop. The right name can give a drug cachet. The wrong name can lead to serious medical errors.

According to the Food and Drug Administration's Web site, an 8-year-old died after receiving methadone instead of methylphenidate. A 19-year-old man showed signs of potentially fatal complications after he was given clozapine instead of olanzapine. A 50-year-old woman was hospitalized after taking Flomax, used to treat an enlarged prostate, instead of Volmax, used to relieve bronchospasm.But what makes a good name?

"A lot of it is more art than science," said William Trombetta, professor of pharmaceutical marketing at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "There are certain letters that express power and control, like Z, M or P. Other letters, like S, are more passive. Depending on what the drug does, you want to give the name certain features."
Want to sound high-tech? Go for lots of Z's and X's, such as Xanax, Xalatan, Zyban and Zostrix.
Want to sound poetic? Try Lyrica, Truvada and Femara.
Want to suggest what it does? Flonase is an allergy medicine that aims to stop nasal flow. Lunesta, a sleeping drug, implies luna, or moon -- a full night's sleep. Humulin is shorthand for "human insulin," a new therapeutic treatment for diabetics that follows decades of animal insulin. Lipitor, a cholesterol fighter that is the world's best-selling drug, suggests "lipids" or fats.

A Rose Is A Rose

2007-09-23T04:43:00.000-07:00

It is well known that the label of schizophrenic is given more often to minorities and to poor people. One school of thought is that people with status would probably be diagnosed with a milder, more acceptable prognosis such as bi-polar - the vast difference between being considered diseased or just disordered. On the other hand, people living very stressful lives might actually be prone to breakdowns but then science would have to adjust the profitable biochemical model and revert to the tedious business of listening to patients.

Good Advice for Everyone

2007-09-21T06:14:00.000-07:00

Bernadine Healy, former head of the American Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health, was recently diagnosed with cancer and offered six guidelines for recovery from the disease. These guidelines can be applied to recovery from schizophrenia as well:
Control what you can.
Stay constructive.
Avoid the anger trap.
Look for the humor.
Insist on respect.
Nourish your spirit.

http://www.chieftain.com/life/1189923721/5

Pfizer Drug Causes Hallucinations

2007-09-21T05:24:00.000-07:00

Anti-fungal drug causes hallucinations but:

The researchers couldn’t explain why the hallucinations occur but hypothesized it could be related to “high blood levels” of the drug.

Pfizer said about 13 million patients have taken the drug, which had sales of $515 million last year. “Cases of treatment-emergent hallucinations have occurred in clinical studies and are described in the product labeling for Vfend,” a Pfizer spokeswoman told Bloomberg. “Health care professionals should be aware of the risk of this potential side-effect so they are able to manage this symptom and reassure patients.”

Suspicions

2007-09-21T04:06:00.000-07:00

The FDA says Haldol might cause heart problems. I find it odd that this has been around for decades but they only find this out after the British study that said this cheap standby was as effective as the expensive atypicals.

Also since hormone replacement has been found to increase your chance of breast cancer and people have quit using it, they are now saying it reduces your chances of getting alzheimers.

When you hear hoofbeats look for horses not zebras

2007-09-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

All medical students have this cliche repeated over and over (I suppose doctors in Africa are told the opposite). I think it is so significant that every form of mental illness shares some form of sleep problem but it is universally dismissed as irrelevant and just a symptom. Injuring brains and f*&cking up the metabolism of people that have a sleep disorder is contrary to the other cliche that medical students are taught - first, do no harm. Now the brain damaging ECT is making a "stunning" comeback with the implanting of devices in brains.

If the current crop of researchers were in charge of fixing scurvy or pellegra, they would not even consider diet but would search for some life-long prescription that would generate some REAL MONEY. How many times have you heard the phase "the modern miracle of medicine"? In reality vaccination (discovered long ago) and improved sanitation are the most instrumental in prolonging life and ending diseases, so you should probably respect your plumber's opinion as much as your doctor's.

Organ transplant and conjoined twin separation gets lots of publicity, but in general modern medicine can not fix most problems beyond resetting bones and hiding symptoms with drugs. Sure, the incidence of breast cancer has dropped - but that happened because people QUIT taking their medicine (premarin and such). Liver and kidney failure because of prescription drugs is a real problem that won't get a telethon like all the other diseases that are so illusive to modern medicine.

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one - Occam's razor or the hoofbeats in other words.

REM sleep

2007-09-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

According to this article many people in the 1950's thought there was a relation between dreams and schizophrenia but it was discounted because schizophrenics and normal people had the same patterns of REM sleep except for when schizophrenics were psychotic.

I still think the answer lies somewhere in sleep and there is a malfunction that is not evident by just studying eye motion. I think it relates to overloads of serotonin because the melatonin/serotonin cycling is wacky.

Interesting Article on Cancer

2007-09-19T03:59:00.000-07:00

In 1924, the German Nobel laureate Otto Warburg first published his observations of a common feature he saw in fast-growing tumors: unlike healthy cells, which generate energy by metabolizing sugar in their mitochondria, cancer cells appeared to fuel themselves exclusively through glycolysis, a less-efficient means of creating energy through the fermentation of sugar in the cytoplasm. Warburg believed that this metabolic switch was the primary cause of cancer, a theory that he strove, unsuccessfully, to establish until his death in 1970.

The theory is simple: If most aggressive cancers rely on the fermentation of sugar for growing and dividing, then take away the sugar and they should stop spreading.
"One big problem we have," says Schmidt, sitting uncomfortably on a small, wooden chair in the crammed tea kitchen of Kammerer's lab, "is that we are only allowed to enroll patients who have completely run out of all other therapeutic options." That means that most people in the study are faring very badly to begin with. All have exhausted traditional treatments, such as surgery, radiation and chemo, and even some alternative ones like hyperthermia and autohemotherapy. Patients in the study have pancreatic tumors and aggressive brain tumors called glioblastomas, among other cancers; participants are recruited primarily because their tumors show high glucose metabolism in PET scans.

The good news is that for five patients who were able to endure three months of carb-free eating, the results were positive: the patients stayed alive, their physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumors slowed or stopped growing, or shrunk. Two patients recently left the study because their tumors kept growing, even though they stuck to the diet.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1662484,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

Meaningful Work

2007-09-18T07:25:00.000-07:00

Work is at the very heart of contemporary life for most people, providing financial security, personal identity, and an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to community life. The right to meaningful, productive work is a basic human need. Employment provides five factors that promote mental health: time structure, social contact and affiliation, collective effort and purpose, social and personal identity, and regular activity. The absence of these crucial factors puts any individual's psychological well being at risk -- whether or not they suffer from a persistent mental illness.

However, for people with persistent mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, or schizophrenia, attaining this right is extremely challenging. It has been estimated that the unemployment rate among those with persistent mental illnesses is an astonishing 90% -- far higher than the 50% unemployment rate among individuals with physical or sensorial disabilities. In other words, only 10% of individuals with persistent mental illness who want to work and have been judged able to work are working. Mental illness hits more human lives and gives rise to a greater waste of human resources than all other forms of disability.

Research has shown that "normal" employed individuals who become unemployed are at more than twice the risk of suffering from major depression.

And by work, I don't mean sorting cardboard or crushing aluminium cans in some workshop, though that is better than nothing. I think unemployment is the reason suicide rates are so high on reservations and also amongst mental health "clients" who see no purpose in life.

Why I Gave Up On Psychiatrists

2007-09-17T04:59:00.000-07:00

My first psychic break followed a series of thefts (300 hives were stolen - a yard at a time over three months). I was labelled schizophrenic even though an interview might have led a different authority to consider post traumatic stress, but NO ONE IN THE PSYCH FIELD was interested in my very stressful condition that led to the break. I was given these doses of Haldol on my first nine day stay at the hospital: 170 milligrams; 240 milligrams; 80 milligrams;, 60 milligrams; 60 milligrams; 100 milligrams; 120 milligrams; 120 milligrams; 140 milligrams 60 milligrams. The recommended daily dose of Haloperidal is 6 milligram and experts agree that one should never exceed 30 milligrams.
I had several other "doctors" but none that earned my respect. One told me risperdal regulated only dopamine when I talked about how it affects serotonin also (which I learned from the company literature) and he argued that the Vietnam vets suffered from PTSD because they were not welcomed home when I said it was caused by the trauma of not knowing who was an enemy and who was a friend (hypervigilance or approval of strangers - which do you think is more stressful). Another gave my friend a neuroleptic and Ritalin at the same time (talk about stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time)and she denied that a lady who had strange mouth motions was suffering from a side effect of her psych drug. When I tried to talk about my thefts, she dismissed me and added Paxil to my regime. I wrote up my theory about REM sleep and psychosis but she ignored it also. The only other one I talked to agreed to cut my dose by 1/3 without telling me that one has to taper gradually and I had an attack of mania. I actually don't think they know what the hell they are doing. I AM NOT A SCIENTOLOGIST.

Why Most Research is False

2007-09-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis is a very well known article about the research field. I didn't understand a lot of it, but this makes sense to me:

The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Conflicts of interest and prejudice may increase bias, u. Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research, and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported. Prejudice may not necessarily have financial roots. Scientists in a given field may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings. Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure. Such nonfinancial conflicts may also lead to distorted reported results and interpretations. Prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable

News Roundup

2007-09-11T06:05:00.000-07:00

Antidepressant as Good as Antipsychotics for Dementia
Study finds fewer side effects for Alzheimer's patients prone to hallucinations, delusions

Doctor Ends Dilemma - Lilly, Doctor Reach Agreement Over Zyprexa Documents Leak

Zyprexa - Lilly's antipsychotic drug was approved by the FDA in 1996, only for the extremely limited use of treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in adults. However, Lilly promoted the drug for off-label, unapproved uses in treating anxiety, sleep disruption, mood swings, attention deficit hyperactivity and dementia in patients of all ages, as can be seen from Medicaid records. Lilly has been accused of virtually concealing the risks of side effects from doctors and from the patients themselves.

The documents reveal that Lilly was well aware that 30% of patients taking Zyprexa, gain 22 pounds or more after a year on the drug, and some patients have reported gaining 100 pounds or more. An email written by vice president and chief medical officer Dr. Alan Breier to Lilly employees in Nov. 1999, reveals that the company was worried that Zyprexa's sales would suffer due to its side effects. The documents also have clinching evidence to prove that Lilly encouraged its sales representatives to play down the “side effects” of Zyprexa whose generic name is olanzapine, when talking to doctors. Zyprexa, which remains Lilly's top-selling drug, garnered worldwide sales of $4.36 billion in 2006. A study, which reviewed the adverse side effects of Zyprexa in 2002, found that of the 289 cases of diabetes reported, 225 of the patients were newly diagnosed. The same year, 100 cases of ketosis, a serious complication of diabetes, 22 cases of pancreatitis, a life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas, and 23 deaths associated with Zyprexa were reported. The results of the study were published in the July 2002 issue of Pharmacotherapy, by P Murali Doraiswamy, the chief of biological psychiatry at Duke University.

The link between diabetes and Zyprexa was again confirmed in February 2004, by the American Diabetes Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity.

Eli Lilly's tale took a tawdry turn as Zyprexa's lethal side effects continued to make headlines. Class action lawsuits as well as separate individual actions began to be filed against Eli Lilly, the makers of Zyprexa, by people who developed severe side effects after taking the drug. Including earlier settlements over Zyprexa, Lilly has thus far agreed to pay about $1.2 billion to settle cases out of court with about 28,500 victims.

After it was established in 2004, that there was an increased risk of hyperglycemia and diabetes associated with Zyprexa, Eli Lilly was asked by the FDA to change language on Zyprexa label describing the health risks for patients taking the medication. In addition, in April 2005, the FDA slapped a black box warning on Zyprexa's label indicating that the drug was not approved for older patients with dementia-related disorders after the drug was found to be associated with increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia.

As soon as the ‘New York Times' began running articles, describing the side effects of Zyprexa and Lilly's off-label marketing campaign called, “ Viva Zyprexa”, in which the drug was prescribed to older patients with symptoms of dementia, Lilly succeeded in getting a judge to issue a permanent injunction in Dec.2006, against Gottstein, and other persons who obtained the documents from Gottstein, ordering them to return the documents to the court. By then, copies of the documents ended up on various Web servers. The New York Times reporter, Alex Berenson, the only journalist who actually quoted from the documents in the press was not included in any injunction.

Psychotropic Drug Makers Bankroll Prescribing Shrinks Part II

The fact that drug makers were bribing state policy makers and members of advisory panels with the ultimate goal of capturing the lucrative Medicaid customer base to increase the sale of psychiatric drugs was first discovered several years ago by Allen Jones, while he was a federal fraud investigator in the Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General Bureau of Special Investigations, and Dr Stefan Kruszewski, a pediatric psychiatrist by trade, who was hired by the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare to review the quality of care provided to persons covered by state programs.
During his investigation in Pennsylvania, Mr Jones found a drug money trail to key policy officials who controlled the Medicaid preferred drug list in that state, which eventually led him to Texas and an elaborate scheme that involved influential psychiatrists, including many who served as professors at Texas universities, and state policy officials who developed the preferred drug list known as the "Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP)".

Mr Jones calls the Texas panel the "most transparent example" of industry influence, because all of the project directors had financial ties to the drug makers. It was put into effect, he says, by buying off doctors who were considered "opinion leaders" in the psychiatric field, along with state policy makers in positions of authority with control over the preferred drug lists.

While reviewing the medical care provided to patients under state care in the summer of 2002, Dr Kruszewski immediately recognized that a mass drugging-for-profit scheme involving Medicaid patients, especially children, was taking place in Pennsylvania, and that several patients had died.

In one case, where the child fortunately survived, Dr Kruszewski found that the girl had been placed on 11 psychiatric drugs at the same time, including 5 antipsychotics, without ever being diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. She exhibited impulsive behaviors and was mentally disabled, but there was nothing in the records to justify the use of all these drugs, he says.

According Dr Kruszewski, the atypicals are associated with an increased the risk of obesity which can lead to diabetes type II, hypertension, heart attacks and stroke. The weight of the girl who was on 11 drugs had ballooned from 106 pounds to 194, Dr Kruszewski found.

In reviewing patient records, he found a state-wide pattern where patients who were not mentally ill were placed on cocktails of 3 or more expensive psychiatric drugs at the same time and kept on the cocktails indefinitely and if patients experienced side effects from the original medications, more drugs were added to the mix.

The sheer greed evidenced by the mass drugging of patients on Medicaid all over the US, similar to that discovered by Dr Kruszewski in Pennsylvania, has forced state Medicaid programs to either put a stop to the drug maker's encouragement of the rampant prescribing of atypicals or go broke.

For instance, Texas Medicaid was charged nearly $15 million for antipsychotics for foster children in 2004, according to the December 2006 Special Report, "Foster Children - Texas Health Care Claims Study." In fact, Texas spent more money on antipsychotics for foster kids than any other class of drugs, and the report said, Zyprexa, Seroquel and Risperdal typically cost an average of $229 per prescription.

A USA TODAY study of FDA data from 2000 to 2004 found 45 pediatric deaths in which atypicals were the primary suspect, with at least six related to diabetes and other causes ranged from heart and pulmonary problems to suicide, choking and liver failure.

A July 29, 2007, report by Robert Farley in the St Petersburg Times revealed that in the last 7 years, the cost to Florida tax payers for atypicals prescribed to children jumped nearly 500%, from $4.7 million to $27.5 million, and on average in 2006, it cost the state nearly $1,800 for each child on atypicals.

Mr Farley reported that last year, more than 18,000 kids on Medicaid were prescribed antipsychotics including 1,100 under the age of 6 and some as young as 3, even though guidelines from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration say children younger than 6 should generally not be given psychotropic drugs and they should "only be considered under the most extraordinary of circumstances."

Psychotropic Drug Makers Bankroll Prescribing Shrinks Part I

According to the August 27, 2007, Pioneer Press, since 2002, Dr Simon has received more than $570,000 from six drug makers, with most of the money coming from Eli Lilly, "whose antipsychotic drug Zyprexa is the most costly each year for Minnesota's fee-for-service health program for the poor and disabled," the article states.

In fact, Lilly's disclosure records for 2004 show payments to Dr Simon totaling a whopping $91,854.95 in that one year, and he also received another couple grand from Seroquel maker AstraZeneca.

Dr Simon told the Pioneer Press that companies pay him to speak about their drugs at conferences and clinics or about the conditions that are treated with the drugs. "Most of the psychiatrists who are really good," he said, "have ties to industry."

Whether Dr Simon is a "really good" psychiatrist is certainly open to debate. In 1997, the state medical board made him complete a clinical training program and issued a report which said that Dr Simon, "frequently makes abrupt and drastic changes in type and dosage of medication which seem erratic, not well considered and poorly integrated with nonmedication strategies."

The board also noted that Dr Simon prescribed addictive drugs to addicts and failed to stop giving medicines to patients when they were suffering severe drug side effects. He said in an interview with the Times that the board's action was a learning experience and that drug makers continued to hire him to speak because he was respected by his peers.

For years, Dr Simon reportedly shared an office with another "really good" psychiatrist by the name of Dr Faruk Abuzzahab. On June 3, 2007, Gardiner Harris and Janet Roberts published a story in the New York Times with the headline: "After Sanctions, Doctors Get Drug Company Pay," and stated:

A decade ago, the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice accused Dr. Faruk Abuzzahab of a "reckless, if not willful, disregard" for the welfare of 46 patients, 5 of whom died in his care or shortly afterward. The board suspended his license for seven months and restricted it for two years after that.

Over the past 20 years, this "really good" psychiatrist has repeatedly prescribed narcotics and other controlled substances to addicts and prescribed narcotics to pregnant women, one of whom delivered a baby prematurely that died, the board found.

The Times reports that separately, in 1979 and 1984, the FDA concluded that Dr Abuzzahab had violated the protocols of every study that the agency audited and that he reported inaccurate data to drug makers.

The FDA said he routinely oversaw 4 to 8 trials at the same time, moved patients from one study to another, gave experimental drugs to patients at their first consultation and once hospitalized a patient for the sole purpose of enrolling him in a study.

As recently as June 2006, the medical board criticized Dr Abuzzahab once again for writing prescriptions for narcotics and this time to patients he knew were using false names, according to the Times.

All that said, Dr Abuzzahab told the Times that he has helped study many popular psychiatric drugs, including Lilly's Zyprexa and Prozac, Janssen's Risperdal, AstraZeneca's Seroquel, Glaxo's Paxil and Pfizer's Zoloft.

A review of the Minnesota disclosure records for 2004 show that the drug makers apparently thought it was beneficial to keep paying big bucks to Dr Abuzzahab. Glaxo paid him $1,000, Pfizer gave him $750, and Wyeth forked over $18,084, in that year alone.

In 2003, psychiatrist Dr Ronald Hardrict pleaded guilty to Medicaid fraud. But a little charge like fraud apparently did not effect this Minnesota psychiatrist's earning power either. The very next year, disclosure records for 2004 show Risperdal maker Janssen paid him $10,000; Seroquel maker AstraZeneca gave $1,250; Abbott Labs paid him over $7500; Glaxo paid $1,500, and Wyeth forked over $8,846.

In reviewing the Minnesota disclosure records for 2004, the name Dr Dean Knudson kept popping up. A September 2004 Newsletter from the Ada Canyon Medical Education Consortium listed Dr Knudson as an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

He must be a "really good" psychiatrist, too, because in 2004 alone, Lilly paid him close to $37,000; he earned nearly $2,750 from Pfizer; Seroquel maker AstraZeneca paid him $6,700; Janssen forked over $3750; Wyeth paid him $11,632, and he received $2,082 from Abbott. Lilly's 2003 forms also show another $8,740 paid to Dr Knudson.

The newsletter showed that Dr Knudson was paid to give educational presentations on dementia. On October 18, 2005, the Associated Press reported a study that showed atypicals used to treat elderly patients with dementia raised their risk of death.

For the study, the researchers pooled the results of 15 studies on the atypicals Zyprexa, Risperdal, Seroquel and Abilify and among more than 5,000 dementia patients, those taking any of the four drugs faced a 54% increased risk of dying within 12 weeks of starting the drugs, compared to patients taking placebos.

Another name that jumps out in the 2004 disclosure records is Dr David Adson. According to the August 20, 2007, Pioneer Press, Dr Adson, of the University of Minnesota, also has a state advisory role as the clinical leader of a program funded by Lilly and provided free of charge to Minnesota, which notifies doctors when their prescriptions for psychiatric drugs are out of line with clinical standards.

Although the program is funded by Lilly, it is supposedly run by an independent company called Comprehensive NeuroScience, Inc. All totaled, 20 states have contracts with CNS to identify doctors "who are prescribing psychiatric drugs outside of recommended guidelines for safety and effectiveness," according to the Press.

Critics say the program is actually a scam set up with state policy makers to make sure the expensive psychiatric drugs remain on the Medicaid covered drug lists instead of being placed on the lists that require prior authorization.

Drug Reps Must be Attractive, not Informed to be Hired

2007-09-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

Drug companies spent nearly $30 billion on marketing in 2005, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

That includes almost $5 billion for direct-to-consumer television, print and Internet advertising, as well as billions in free drug samples, educational seminars, grants to patient groups and visits by sales reps to woo doctors. Consumers Union estimates there are 90,000 drug detailers plying their trade in the United States.

Famous People Who Attempted Suicide

2007-09-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

This list is way longer than I expected. And BBC produced the documentary Dangerous Knowledge in which

David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Goudel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

If the people who possess everything imaginable and the most intelligent are troubled, happiness is indeed an illusive thing.

ADHD and TV (The American Babysitter)

2007-09-04T05:03:00.000-07:00

Study Links Attention Problems to Early TV viewing and Time magazine reports that the Baby Einstein videos actually retard language development:

Three studies have shown that watching television, even if it includes educational programming such as Sesame Street, delays language development...In fact, the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development."

As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. "There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better," he says. "But that's not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation." His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. "Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal," says Christakis, "and by comparison, reality is boring."

This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in 1999 that no child under two years old watch any television. The authors of the new study might suggest reading instead: children who got daily reading or storytelling time with their parents showed a slight increase in language skills.

"the watching probably interferes with the crucial wiring being laid down in their brains during early development"

I have always said that the continual flashing of a TV screen screws up development of young minds but no one ever listens to me. And limiting TV to adult usage might hinder kids insatiable desire for more and more stuff so I doubt it will go away soon, even if sometimes it leads to prescription amphetamine use that then leads to a diagnosis of bipolar (The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003)that leads to neuroleptics that leads to lifelong disability. Cause and effect is a bitch.

Zyprexa Drug Rep

2007-09-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

The media is all excited about the possibility of a new drug for schizophrenia from the same people that brought you Zyprexa.

Lilly tested the new drug against its older drug Zyprexa and found it did not relieve the symptoms of schizophrenia as well, but also did not cause many of the side-effects, such as weight gain, cholesterol and hormonal changes.

- -Yahoo News

Lilly develops new Schizophrenia drug

2007-09-03T04:31:00.000-07:00

New York Times article on a new schizophrenia drug being developed. This one targets the neurotransmitter that goes wacky when people take PCP. The dopamine ones were defended because they acted on the neurotransmitter that was affected by amphetamines. They dismiss the neurotransmitter that is affected by LSD. Of course the PCP and amphetamine ones need costly lifelong medication while the LSD one needs cheap proper sleep.

And before you cheer, this new drug may cause even more brain damage than the dopamine ones:

For decades, psychiatrists have known that users of PCP, a street drug sometimes called angel dust, have symptoms nearly identical to those of people with schizophrenia. By the 1980s, scientists had discovered that PCP blocked brain receptors that are triggered by an amino acid called glutamate. This led some companies and scientists to study ways to stimulate glutamate receptors as a treatment for schizophrenia.

But the brain has many different kinds of glutamate receptors, and figuring out how to stimulate or block them in medically beneficial ways has proved complicated. Instead of focusing on the receptors blocked by PCP, Schoepp concentrated on modulating the action of glutamate receptors in the brain's prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for personality and learning.

"This is a system that is so fundamental to the function of your brain that it is quite powerful," said Schoepp.

-International Herald Tribune

And this article says to me that calling schizophrenia a biochemical disease does not account for the high rate of recovery when family support contributes to recovery. Recovery From Schizophrenia: An International Perspective. A Report From the WHO Collaborative Project, the International Study of Schizophrenia

Kraepelin’s view that a deteriorating course is a hallmark of the illness just isn’t true. Heterogeneity of outcome, both in terms of symptoms and functioning, is the signature feature, an observation that has profound implications for our understanding and management of the condition. Good outcome was evident in more than one-half of the International Study of Schizophrenia subjects. In Agra, for example, no long-term disability was detected in 60% of patients, due in part, the chapter authors conclude, to the support of the extended family. In Cali, Colombia, two-thirds of the subjects were working full-time at follow-up, while in Nottingham, England, more than 60% were free of all psychotic symptoms. Less good outcomes were apparent in other centers, but the conclusion is clear: bad outcome is not a necessary component of the natural history of schizophrenia; it is a consequence of the interaction between the individual and his or her social and economic world.

Sleep Therapy

2007-09-02T12:32:00.000-07:00

Prolonged sleep therapy was believed to have originated with a Scottish physician who was asked in 1897 to transport a manic woman from Japan to Shanghai, a five hundred mile trip. Without any nurses to assist him, the physician decided to put the woman to sleep with a bromide. She reportedly was without mania when she awoke. Modern attempts at prolonged sleep treatment started in the 1920's with the Swiss psychiatrist Klasi who induced sleep through multiple injections of the barbituate, Somnifene. Patients were sent into a drug- induced unconsciousness for a week to a month, with daily awakenings for food and bowel movements. Prolonged narcosis, as it was called, was thought to aid in relaxing and resting the patient's mind. It generally resulted in opiate addiction. Some of the schizophrenic patients improved but sometimes the treatment proved fatal as patients developed pneumonia.

History of Treatments for Schizophrenia and other Madness

The psychiatric community cannot be gentle. Rather than duplicating a normal sleep pattern to test the theory of sleep as treatment, they had to induce extended coma and the pneumonia that went along with it. A coma is not anything like natural sleep. The researchers are striving to find some genetic marker that schizophrenics share. The one thing schizophrenics share is sleeplessness prior to a psychic break but they all dismiss that is just one symptom of the disease. Would you find it hard to trust an occupation that believed in lobotomies for years? Or that inducing fear was considered acceptable treatment? Or told you that drugs that destroyed sections of your brain were like insulin for diabetes?

The Problem with Education

2007-08-31T04:47:00.000-07:00

An education teaches you what to think, not how to think. For instance, if a doctor has studied one way to do something he will resist anything new even if it makes more sense. For example, it took ten years before doctors would accept the idea that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, 200 years to stop the practice of bleeding. When we consider that a great deal of their ongoing education is supplied by drug reps, I fear things will only get worse.

The Perfect Therapist

2007-08-30T12:02:00.001-07:00

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away.
-- Dinah Craik

A Good Session

2007-08-28T15:08:00.001-07:00

Relapse or Withdrawal Reaction

2007-08-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

When someone stops taking a drug they have used for some time, and then seem to get ill again, is it a withdrawal reaction or is it relapse? Has the user actually become ill again, or are drug withdrawal symptoms making them seem (and feel) ill?
The confusion goes back a long way and is found with many drugs, especially sedatives and hypnotics. It partly explains the failure to spot dependence on benzodiazepines (eg Valium/diazepam), for many years. BDZs were usually prescribed for anxiety and stress - so if people felt anxious and stressed when they tried to stop taking them, it was easy to conclude that the drugs worked and were worth taking. World-wide, billions of prescriptions had been written before it was officially recognised that this compounded the dependence, worsening symptoms on withdrawal. The BDZs didn't really go on working at all.
Apart from this, the problem was that the powers-that-be didn't want to know, and went to some lengths to deny the problem could exist. Leading experts from government and industry produced large amounts of lack of evidence to show that dependence was non-existent or rare. Problems were seen as exceptions to the rule, and often attributed to patients with 'dependence-prone personalities', or to sensational reporting by the media. The first serious warnings about benzodiazepine dependence started to appear only after legal action began.
Tranter & Healy (1998) find there is strong evidence that a discontinuation syndrome exists(re: neuroleptics), though nothing like enough to be able to pinpoint how much of a problem it is.
They reached this conclusion after reviewing much evidence on different fronts, including a review of studies in which neuroleptic drugs had been used to treat non-psychiatric states. These are revealing because, if "psychiatric" symptoms appear when a drug is discontinued, they must be true withdrawal symptoms (as there cannot be relapse). The authors point, for example, to long-neglected evidence from the 1960s, when chlorpromazine (the archetypal neuroleptic drug) was used experimentally to treat TB.
Its conclusions mean that the long-term effectiveness of neuroleptics may need to be thoroughly re-evaluated. If withdrawal symptoms have invariably been interpreted as evidence of relapse, the effectiveness of these drugs would have been greatly overestimated over the years

http://www.socialaudit.org.uk/5106-988.htm

The issue was addressed in the Archives of General Psychiatry by an extensive review of neuroleptic withdrawal studies conducted in the last 35 years, accompanied by invited assessment and commentary from 11 clinical researchers. Patricia Gilbert, M.D., and others, of the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego and the San Diego Veterans Affairs Medical Center, found a cumulative relapse rate of 53 percent among 4,365 patients with schizophrenia within a mean follow-up period of 9.7 months after medication was withdrawn; compared to 16 percent who relapse while maintained on antipsychotics (Gilbert and others 1995).
While medication withdrawal was associated with a high risk for relapse, the reviewers found its desirability affirmed by the nearly 50 percent of patients who remained stable off medication for observation periods of more than 10 months. They suggested that for a substantial proportion of cases, however, slow tapering to the lowest effective dose, which may be zero for selected patients, is a more prudent target than complete drug withdrawal.
The researchers cited a study not included in their review (Green and others 1992) which found that a slowly tapered medication regimen over an eight-week period produced relapses in only 8 percent of patients over a six-month follow-up, in comparison to 50 percent who relapsed with more rapid withdrawal over two weeks. Another cited recent study (Smith 1994) achieved an approximate 60 percent reduction in required neuroleptic dosing with accompanied improvement in psychopathologic symptoms in 16 chronically psychotic schizophrenic patients hospitalized for a mean of 11.5 years. Their dose was very slowly reduced by one-fifth to one-third every one or two months as clinical condition allowed.
The two studies did find that medication maintenance tended to reduce likelihood of relapse, although a substantial number of patients receiving medication (46 percent) still relapsed within a two-year follow-up period.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p950633.html

To dispense neuroleptics to the prison population to reduce aggressiveness and then to let them out to the community while they abruptly withdraw from the antipsychotics and go psychotic is unconscionable and is in essence manufacturing insanity.

My Theory of What Causes Crazy

2007-08-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

The current treatment is to restrict the amount of dopamine available to the brain. This theory is 50 years old and all the treatments are variations of the same song. When LSD was discovered and seen to cause psychosis, researchers for a short time theorized that serotonin excess might be the problem, but they rejected the idea because amphetamines could also cause psychosis and that chemical was dopamine related and reassured them that their old treatments were effective. Hallucinogens affect the central nervous system by disrupting the neurotransmitter serotonin that serves as a filter of unimportant information from incoming sensory stimuli.

Researchers feel dopamine is a chemical messenger (whose effects can be mimicked by amphetamine and cocaine) that makes us happy - it is the pleasure chemical. Temporary elevation of dopamine levels often leads to an improvement in mood, alertness, improved libido, improved memory functions and perhaps even an enhancement in verbal fluency and creativity. It is the neurotransmitter that helps produce feelings of satisfaction and pleasure. Schizophrenics not in the throes of psychosis are said to be experiencing the negative symptoms: apathy, lack of emotion, poor or nonexistant social functioning, disorganized thoughts, difficulty concentrating and/or following instructions, difficulty completing tasks, and memory problems. The neuroleptics cut off the dopamine supply and then psychiatrists say the natural results of the deprivation are a symptom of the disease. One of the leading researchers of schizophrenia, Dr. Daniel R. Weinberger (Chief of the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch, Division of Intramural Research Programs, at the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health. whose papers were cited a total of 2413 times, making him the second-most-cited scientist of the 1990s in schizophrenia) explains that there is too little dopamine in the prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia which then causes too much to be produced in the mesolimbic areas. This doesn't make sense to me - in no other part of the body can excess and deficiency coexist.

Sleep Disorders
Serotonin is daily moderated by melatonin which is produced when we sleep. Robert Whitaker, author of Mad in America is currently interviewing recovered schizophrenics and he says absolutely every single case admits to a period of sleeplessness prior to a psychic break. Mind Freedom, an organization of mental health survivors, has interviewed people and the sleep problem is recounted multiple times.

There is an episode of Star Trek in which the crew of the Enterprise was deprived of REM sleep because of some freaky space glitch. As a consequence of being dream deprived, they began to hallucinate when they were awake. Scientists like John Lilly and Jean Houston have proven this does indeed occur.

Small doses of sleep deprivation are familiar to everyone. The most common symptoms of sleep deprivation are inattention, staring, trembling hands, drooping eyelids, increased pain sensitivity and a reduced sense of well-being. Extreme sleep deprivation can lead to a seemingly psychotic state of paranoia and hallucinations in otherwise healthy people. Curiously, sleeping problems occur in almost all people with mental disorders, including those with Alzheimer's disease, depression and schizophrenia.

Animal studies show that sleep and dreaming (REM) sleep are necessary for survival. For example, while rats normally live for two to three years, those deprived of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep survive only about 5 weeks on average and rats deprived of all sleep stages live only about 3 weeks. Sleep deprived rats also develop abnormally low body temperatures and sores on their tail and paws. Scientists (H.P.Roffwarg, J.N. Muzio, W.C. Dement, 1966, Science 152, 604) feel that REM sleep must play an essential role in the development of the central nervous system because developing babies require proportionately greater amounts of REM sleep than a developed adult. In fact the brains of infant rats show significant abnormal development if they are deprived of REM sleep.

Researchers suggest that healthy people need not only an adequate amount but also the right kind of sleep just like they need an adequate amount of proper exercise. In adults non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep alternate cyclically throughout the night beginning with NREM sleep which lasts about 80 minutes followed by REM sleep which lasts about 10 minutes. Theorists suspect that REM sleep relaxes the mind and NREM sleep relaxes the body, and that most remembered dreams occur during REM sleep. It is during REM sleep that most brain areas show greatly increased blood flow, almost uniformly greater than 50% above the waking level and as great as nearly 200%. Brain temperatures rise during REM sleep. There are nerve cells in our brains which fire five to ten times more frequently during certain sleep stages than during wakefulness and it is likely that dreams are responsible for maintaining the central nervous system throughout the lifespan.

Incidentally, REM sleep also stimulates the brain regions used in learning. In an experiment, people taught a skill and then deprived of NREM sleep could recall what they had learned after sleeping while people deprived of REM sleep could not.

Sleeping patterns change in adolescence. Beginning in early adolescence there is a gradual decline in delta wave sleep. The decline may represent one of the earliest known indicators of the aging of the central nervous system and may be relevant to the appearance of schizophrenia in early adulthood. Sleeplessness and stress often go hand in hand.

Sleep is controlled by the conversion of serotonin to melatonin. The pineal gland located deep in the center of the brain stores serotonin that is chemically converted to melatonin and the melatonin is converted back to serotonin in daily cycles that determine the body clock. If melatonin is not produced, the serotonin goes into overload and causes psychosis.

Many people who take the over-the-counter melatonin have commented on an increase in the vividness and frequency of dream activity and have noted an increase in dream recall. Loss of dream recall is known to be a symptom in other problems. Researchers have found that 80% of depressed patients cannot recall dreams. It has been found that alcohol suppresses REM sleep, causing the body to make up this loss of REM by carrying it over to the waking stage. In an advanced stage, this waking stage hallucination may be the cause of delirium tremens. Researchers have found that people deprived on REM sleep for one night will have more REM dreams the following night. Perhaps our bodies quota of hallucinations must be supplied one way or another. "Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." -William Dement

Psychotic episodes are the most frightening to the general public and of the most concern to psychiatrists. Psychosis is actually not so very uncommon and there are lots of medical and psychiatric causes of hallucinations besides schizophrenia. Some common causes include the following:

*Pellagra, which is the deficiency disease caused by a severe lack of niacin in the diet also is characterized by dementia.
*B-12 deficiency which also causes insomnia
*Fever, which can occur with almost any infection, frequently produces hallucinations in children and the elderly
*Intoxication or withdrawal from such drugs as amphetamines, LSD, cocaine/crack, heroin, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), PCP and alcohol
*Delirium or dementia
*Sensory deprivation such as blindness or deafness
*Lack of sleep and disruption of circadian rhythms
*Severe medical illness including liver failure, kidney failure, and brain cancer
*Various prescription drug reactions: Lariam, the commercial name for the anti-malarial drug mefloquine, withdrawal from excessive doses of barbiturates (sedative drugs commonly prescribed as sleeping pills), PCP used as human anaesthesia,Aldomet, Benadryl, Catapres, Celebrex, Cipro, Dexatrim, Elavil, Halcion, Inderal, Lanoxin, Procanbid, Sonata, Tagamet, Ultracet, Valium, Vioxx and withdrawal from neuroleptics

If schizophrenia were excess dopamine, the sufferer would be animated and the hallucinations would be glorious and euphoric rather than usually frightening. The current excess dopamine idea came about because the hallucinations were similar to amphetamine psychosis - amphetamines increase dopamine, hence dopamine is the problem. But who sleeps less than a "speed freak" thus creating an imbalance of serotonin/melatonin? The soporific effects of the antipsychotics is the reason they may appear to be effective; however, unfortunately the antipsychotics cause irreversible brain damage and frequent Parkinson's disease.

Deficiencies cause the human body many more problems than excess. The diseases of rickets, scurvy, beri–beri, pellagra, hypothyroidism, immune deficiencies and diabetes are all diseases in which the body does not manufacture enough of an essential element. Even the "excess cholesterol causes heart attacks" theory has come into question:

When I say “heart attack” what are your first thoughts in terms of causes? A good bet is that you will consider cholesterol levels, and immediately after that, diet. After a bit more thought, you might want to add stress induced by a job with too much pressure and responsibility, and finally—just maybe—you will consider the possibility of a genetic predisposition. These are all the causes we hear from the media are associated with heart disease, and indubitably there is a lot of research to back these claims up. However, and most astoundingly, research available since the 1960s and repeated several times since, also shows that all the above factors are actually minor causes of heart disease. The best single predictor of heart problems is indeed stress, but of an entirely different and still widely ignored type: the stress that comes not from doing too much or being under self-imposed pressure, but from being ordered around with little or no control over your destiny.

A study conducted among 17,000 British civil servants (and before that on a million employees of Bell Telephones in the 1960s) clearly shows that the status of a person’s job is the most reliable predictor of heart attack, more than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure (though these count as well, so don’t rush to get that triple cheeseburger just yet). High cholesterol is also a risk factor, but only in people that are genetically predisposed to it. It seems that your heart is by and large at the mercy of the size of your pay check.

The studies linking the pecking order on the job with heart problems found that what happens is that being ordered around diminishes your sense of control over your life, which causes stress mediated by the release of the hormone cortisol. High levels of cortisol not only create problems for your coronary arteries, but depress your immune response, so that you are also more likely to fall prey to an infection—which is not helped by the fact that the rise in cortisol is accompanied by a decrease in serotonin(ed note: did he mean melatonin?), meaning that you don’t sleep very well and you never feel rested.

Researchers have been able to explode another myth related to heart attacks: the idea that it is a disease of the rich, suffered by CEOs because of the high pressure they experience on their job for prolonged periods of time and the associated responsibilities of such a situation. Well, if you are a CEO and are planning on using that as an excuse to raise your bonus this year, forget it. While there are exceptions, the heart attack rate in this category is actually much lower than the population at large, presumably because these people are actually very much in control of what they are doing, since they are everybody else’s boss (and even when they “fail” they get to retire with a few extra million dollars in their bank accounts). This category becomes at risk—rather ironically—only after retirement, possibly because their new “relaxed” life style is actually associated with very little control. Taking it easy for someone used to issue orders and be in charge can be fatal, literally.

Human beings are primates, and evolutionary theory teaches us to expect something similar in our inter-specific cousins. Sure enough, studies on baboons have shown an increase in stress level and production of cortisol in males that join a new troop, because when they do so they find themselves at the bottom of the pecking order, with little control over availability of food and mates. The same is true for monkeys studied in zoos, where researchers found a nice inverse relationship between pecking order and the furring up of arties. Next time you see a monkey or ape, remember to empathize with their working conditions.

Amazingly, you can even demonstrate the effect experimentally on humans by dividing people into two groups, giving them the same tasks, but ordering around one group and empowering the other with self decision making. The latter group experiences lower levels of stress hormones, blood pressure and heart rate. - Dr. Massimo Pigliucci

Sometimes medicine takes a 180 degree turn such as the findings that giving too much liquid to distance runners may prove fatal or that bacteria causes stomach ulcers. "It is an observable fact that psychiatry, unlike any legitimate science, is a discipline in which two dissertations so incompatible that for either one to be valid the other must be incompetent nonsense can both be awarded Ph.D.s by the same department of the same university in the same year." William R. Harwood, Book reviewer on Amazon.

I once saw a program where the lecturer held up a five year old copy of the New England Journal of Medicine and said something to the effect that "we no longer believe 60% of what was printed here." How is it that the psychiatry business still keeps trying to ram that same round peg into that square hole after 50 years of dopamine suppression that continues to fail to fix the problem? Or would mild sedatives, removal from a stressful environment and a sleeping pill be less profitable than lifelong drugging?

Too true

2007-08-02T03:49:00.000-07:00

Actually I believe this is true. That is why the psychiatric community loves the "chemical imbalance" thing.

Mental Illness on the rise

2007-08-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

SS: Your research also shows that there is a real increase in people who have a severe mental disorder. Now, this seems counterintuitive, but is it true that you believe much of this increase is caused by the overuse of some of the new generations of psychiatric drugs?
RW: Yes, exactly. I looked at the number of the so-called severely disabled mentally ill -- people who aren't working or who are somehow dysfunctional because of mental illness. So I wanted to chart through history the percentage of the population who are considered the disabled mentally ill.

Now, by 1903, we see that roughly 1 out of every 500 people in the United States is hospitalized for mental illness. By 1955, at the start of the modern era of psychiatric drugs, roughly one out of every 300 people was disabled by mental illness. Now, let's go to 1987, the end of the first generation of antipsychotic drugs; and from 1987 forward we get the modern psychiatric drugs. From 1955 to 1987, during this first era of psychiatric drugs -- the antipsychotic drugs Thorazine and Haldol and the tricyclic antidepressants (such as Elavil and Anafranil) -- we saw the number of disabled mentally ill increase four-fold, to the point where roughly one out of every 75 persons are deemed disabled mentally ill.

Now, there was a shift in how we cared for the disabled mentally ill between 1955 and 1987. In 1955, we were hospitalizing them. Then, by 1987, we had gone through social change, and we were now placing people in shelters, nursing homes, and some sort of community care, and gave them either SSI or SSDI payments for mental disability. In 1987, we started getting these supposedly better, second-generation psychiatric drugs like Prozac and the other selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants. Shortly after that, we get the new, atypical antipsychotic drugs like Zyprexa (olanzapine), Clozaril and Risperdal.

What's happened since 1987? Well, the disability rate has continued to increase until it's now one in every 50 Americans. Think about that: One in every 50 Americans disabled by mental illness today. And it's still increasing. The number of mentally disabled people in the United States has been increasing at the rate of 150,000 people per year since 1987. That's an increase every day over the last 17 years of 410 people per day newly disabled by mental illness.

SS: So that leads to the obvious question. If psychiatry has introduced these so-called wonder drugs like Prozac and Zoloft and Zyprexa, why is the incidence of mental illness going up dramatically?
RW: That's exactly it. This is a scientific question. We have a form of care where we're using these drugs in an ever more expansive manner, and supposedly we have better drugs and they're the cornerstone of our care, so we should see decreasing disability rates. That's what your expectation would be.

Instead, from 1987 until the present, we saw an increase in the number of mentally disabled people from 3.3 million people to 5.7 million people in the United States. In that time, our spending on psychiatric drugs increased to an amazing degree. Combined spending on antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants jumped from around $500 million in 1986 to nearly $20 billion in 2004. So we raise the question: Is the use of these drugs somehow actually fueling this increase in the number of the disabled mentally ill?

When you look at the research literature, you find a clear pattern of outcomes with all these drugs -- you see it with the antipsychotics, the antidepressants, the anti-anxiety drugs and the stimulants like Ritalin used to treat ADHD. All these drugs may curb a target symptom slightly more effectively than a placebo does for a short period of time, say six weeks. An antidepressant may ameliorate the symptoms of depression better than a placebo over the short term.

What you find with every class of these psychiatric drugs is a worsening of the target symptom of depression or psychosis or anxiety over the long term, compared to placebo-treated patients. So even on the target symptoms, there's greater chronicity and greater severity of symptoms. And you see a fairly significant percentage of patients where new and more severe psychiatric symptoms are triggered by the drug itself.

SS: New psychiatric symptoms created by the very drugs people are told will help them recover?
RW: Absolutely. The most obvious case is with the antidepressants. A certain percentage of people placed on the SSRIs because they have some form of depression will suffer either a manic or psychotic attack -- drug-induced. This is well recognized. So now, instead of just dealing with depression, they're dealing with mania or psychotic symptoms. And once they have a drug-induced manic episode, what happens? They go to an emergency room, and at that point they're newly diagnosed. They're now said to be bipolar and they're given an antipsychotic to go along with the antidepressant; and, at that point, they're moving down the path to chronic disability.

SS: Modern psychiatry claims that these psychiatric drugs correct pathological brain chemistry. Is there any evidence to back up their claim that abnormal brain chemistry is the culprit in schizophrenia and depression?
RW: This is the key thing everyone needs to understand. It really is the answer that unlocks this mystery of why the drugs would have this long-term problematic effect. Start with schizophrenia. They hypothesize that these drugs work by correcting an imbalance of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain.

The theory was that people with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine systems; and these drugs, by blocking dopamine in the brain, fixed that chemical imbalance. Therefore, you get the metaphor that they're like insulin is for diabetes; they're fixing an abnormality. With the antidepressants, the theory was that people with depression had too low levels of serotonin; the drugs upped the levels of serotonin in the brain and therefore they're balancing the brain chemistry.

First of all, those theories never arose from investigations into what was actually happening to people. Rather, they would find out that antipsychotics blocked dopamine and so they theorized that people had overactive dopamine systems. Same with the antidepressants. They found that antidepressants upped the levels of serotonin; therefore, they theorized that people with depression must have low levels of serotonin.

But here is the thing that one wishes all of America would know and wishes psychiatry would come clean on: They've never been able to find that people with schizophrenia have overactive dopamine systems. They've never been able to find that people with depression have underactive serotonin systems. They've never found consistently that any of these disorders are associated with any chemical imbalance in the brain. The story that people with mental disorders have known chemical imbalances -- that's a lie. We don't know that at all. It's just something that they say to help sell the drugs and help sell the biological model of mental disorders.

But the kicker is this. We do know, in fact, that these drugs perturb how these chemical messengers work in the brain. The real paradigm is: People diagnosed with mental disorders have no known problem with their neurotransmitter systems; and these drugs perturb the normal function of neurotransmitters.

SS: So rather than fixing a chemical imbalance, these widely prescribed drugs distort the brain chemistry and make it pathological.
RW: Absolutely. Stephen Hyman, a well-known neuroscientist and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote a paper in 1996 that looked at how psychiatric drugs affect the brain. He wrote that all these drugs create perturbations in neurotransmitter functions. And he notes that the brain, in response to this drug from the outside, alters its normal functions and goes through a series of compensatory adaptations.

In other words, it tries to adapt to the fact that an antipsychotic drug is blocking normal dopamine functions. Or in the case of antidepressants, it tries to compensate for the fact that you're blocking a normal reuptake of serotonin. The way it does this is to adapt in the opposite way. So, if you're blocking dopamine in the brain, the brain tries to put out more dopamine and it actually increases the number of dopamine receptors. So a person placed on antipsychotic drugs will end up with an abnormally high number of dopamine receptors in the brain.

If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite. It stops producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone who is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally low level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient's brain is functioning in a way that is "qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state." So what Stephen Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done is present a paradigm for how these drugs affect the brain that shows that they're inducing a pathological state.

SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the brain that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these new wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?
RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we're perturbing that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry Jacobs, a Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an SSRI antidepressant. "These drugs," he said, "alter the level of synaptic transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under normal environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or physiologic change produced under these conditions might more appropriately be considered pathologic rather than reflective of the normal biological role of serotonin."

Psychiatric Drugs: An Assault on the Human Condition
Street Spirit Interview with Robert Whitaker
Interview by Terry Messman

Joke

2007-07-28T03:55:00.000-07:00

Why do they put nails in coffins?
They do it to stop medical oncologists from giving chemotherapy.

One lawyer's view on psych drugs

2007-07-19T06:19:00.000-07:00

1) People do change when they use psych drugs -- they are on drugs! Not medicines! Get the difference? Medicines cure actual illnesses. Drugs mask personal problems or actual physical issues no differently than street drugs or liquor do. LSD was once a psychiatric drug. So the actual problems are never solved unless the individual works it out himself or with friends, or finds real help. But we also have the problem of the side effects of these drugs which brings me to my next point.
2) In June, the FDA warned that the use of the drugs Concerta, Ritalin, Straterra and Adderall can produce "visual hallucinations, suicidal ideation, psychotic behavior, as well as aggression or violent behavior" in children.
3) The entire premise for the use of these drugs is based on the claim of a "medical" cause for peoples' emotional issues -- the so-called "chemical imbalance." American Psychiatric Association President Steven Sharfstein admitted recently that there is no way to test for a "chemical imbalance" so none is ever done.

This was found while I was trying to recover the article that said 28% of people using risperdal were incontinent even though it is not listed as a side effect on the company literature. Thought it summed things up pretty well - the drugs don't cure and in some cases even cause psychosis.

Do Schizophrenics Recover?

2007-07-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

'Beautiful'—but Not Rare—Recovery
John Nash’s Genius Is Extraordinary. Recovering From Schizophrenia Is Anything But.
Massachusetts psychologist Patricia Deegan said she refused to believe a hospital psychiatrist’s grim prediction that she would never get better. (Julia Malakie. - For The Washington Post)

By Sandra G. Boodman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 12, 2002

The end of "A Beautiful Mind," the Oscar-nominated movie based loosely on the life of Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr., depicts the Princeton mathematician's emergence from the stranglehold of paranoid schizophrenia, the most feared and disabling of mental illnesses. Moviegoers who have watched the cinematic metamorphosis of actor Russell Crowe – from the disheveled genius who furiously covers his office walls with delusional scribblings to the silver-haired academic perfectly at home in the rarefied company of fellow laureates in Stockholm – might assume that Nash's recovery from three decades of psychosis is unique.

But mental health experts say that while Nash's life is undeniably remarkable, his gradual recovery from schizophrenia is not.

That contention is likely to surprise many people, including some psychiatrists, who continue to believe the theory, promulgated a century ago by Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries, that the serious thought and mood disorder is a relentless, degenerative illness that robs victims of social and intellectual function, invariably dooming them to a miserable life in a homeless shelter, a prison cell or, at best, a group home.

Psychiatric researchers who have tracked patients after they left mental hospitals, as well as a growing number of recovered patients who have banded together to form a mental health consumer movement, contend that recovery of the kind Nash experienced is not rare.

"The stereotype everyone has of this disease is that there's no such thing as recovery," said Washington psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, who has written extensively about schizophrenia, an illness he has studied for decades and one that has afflicted his younger sister for nearly half a century. "The fact is that recovery is more common than people have been led to believe. . . . But I don't think any of us know for sure how many people recover."

The notion that Nash's recovery is exceptional "is very pervasive even though the facts don't support it, because that's what generations of psychiatrists have been taught," said Daniel B. Fisher, a board-certified Massachusetts psychiatrist and activist who has fully recovered from schizophrenia for which he was hospitalized three times between the ages of 25 and 30.

"Many of us who have spoken about our recovery are confronted with the statement that you couldn't have been schizophrenic, you must have been misdiagnosed," added Fisher, 58, who holds a PhD in biochemistry and went to medical school after his hospitalizations.

The belief that recovery from schizophrenia occurs only occasionally is belied by at least seven studies of patients who were followed for more than 20 years after their discharge from mental hospitals in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. In papers published between 1972 and 1995, researchers found that between 46 and 68 percent of patients had either fully recovered – they had no symptoms of mental illness, took no psychiatric medication, worked and had normal relationships – or were, like John Nash, significantly improved but impaired in one area of functioning.

Although the patients received a variety of treatments, researchers speculate that the improvement may reflect both an ability to manage illness that accompanies age coupled with the natural decline, beginning in the mid-forties, in the levels of brain chemicals that may be linked to schizophrenia.

"One reason nobody knows about recovery is that most folks don't tell anybody because the stigma is too great," said Frederick J. Frese III, 61, who was hospitalized 10 times for paranoid schizophrenia in his twenties and thirties.

Despite his illness, Frese, who considers himself "definitely not fully recovered but in pretty good shape," earned a doctorate in psychology and was, for 15 years, director of psychology at Western Reserve Psychiatric Hospital in Ohio, the state's largest mental hospital. Frese holds faculty appointments at Case Western Reserve University and Northern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.

He has been married for 25 years and is the father of four children as well as past president of the National Mental Health Consumers Association. These achievements are hardly consistent with the prognosis Frese was given at 27, when a psychiatrist told him he had a "degenerative brain disorder" and would probably spend the rest of his life in the state mental hospital to which he had recently been committed.

Not Everybody Recovers

No mental health expert – nor any of the eight recovered schizophrenia patients interviewed for this story – would suggest that recovery or even marked improvement is possible for all the 2.2 million Americans afflicted with the confounding illness that typically strikes in late adolescence or early adulthood.

Sometimes schizophrenia, which is believed to result from an elusive combination of biological and environmental factors, is simply too severe. In other cases medications have little or no effect, leaving people vulnerable to suicide, which claims more than 10 percent of those diagnosed, according to epidemiological studies.

For others, mental illness is complicated by other serious problems: substance abuse, homelessness, poverty and an increasingly dysfunctional mental health system that favors 10-minute monthly medication checks, which are covered by insurance, over more effective but time-consuming forms of support, which are not.

The improvement seen in many schizophrenia patients as they reach their fifties and sixties generally affects only the most acute psychotic symptoms such as vivid hallucinations and imaginary voices. Patients rarely revert spontaneously to the way they were before they got sick, experts say, and many in whom the disease burns out are left with the emotional flatness and extreme apathy that also characterize schizophrenia.

While a growing number of mental health workers agree that recovery occurs, there is no consensus on how to define or measure it. Academic researchers typically adhere to a strict definition of recovery as a return to normal functioning without reliance on psychiatric drugs. Others, many of them ex-patients, embrace a more elastic definition that would encompass people like Fred Frese and John Nash, who continue to have symptoms they have learned to manage.

"I'd say there's a gradation of severity of illness and a gradation of recovery," said Francine Cournos, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who directs a clinic in Manhattan for people with severe mental illness. "The number of people who wind up completely symptom-free and without relapse is probably small. But everyone we treat we can help."

A Bleak Prognosis

In 1972, Swiss psychiatrist Manfred Bleuler published a landmark study that appeared to refute the teachings of his eminent father, Eugen Bleuler, who in 1908 coined the term schizophrenia. The elder Bleuler, an influential colleague of Freud's, believed that schizophrenia had an inexorable downhill course, much like premature dementia.

His son, curious about the natural history of the disease, tracked down 208 patients who had been discharged from one hospital an average of 20 years earlier. Manfred Bleuler found that 20 percent were fully recovered, while another 30 percent were greatly improved. Within a few years research teams in other countries essentially replicated his findings.

In 1987 psychologist Courtenay M. Harding, then at the Yale University School of Medicine, published a series of rigorous studies involving 269 former residents of the back wards of Vermont's only state mental hospital, where they had spent years. Widely considered to have been the sickest patients in the hospital, they had participated in a 10-year model rehabilitation program that included housing in the community, training in jobs and social skills and individualized treatment.

Two decades after they completed the program, 97 percent of the patients were interviewed by researchers. Harding, a former psychiatric nurse who expected only modest improvement, said she was stunned to discover that about 62 percent were judged by researchers to be either fully recovered – they took no medication and were indistinguishable from people who had no diagnosable mental illness – or functioned well but had not recovered in one area. (They took medication or heard voices.) A study comparing the Vermont patients to a matched group in Maine, a state with much more parsimonious mental health services, found that 49 percent of the Maine patients had recovered or improved significantly.

So why has the almost universally gloomy prognosis for schizophrenia persisted in the face of convincing empirical evidence to the contrary?

"Psychiatry has always clung to a narrow medical model," observed Harding, who directs Boston University's Institute for the Study of Human Resilience. "Psychiatric dictionaries still do not have a definition of recovery," but speak instead of remission, which "carries the heavy time bomb of impending illness," she observed.

Columbia's Francine Cournos, an internist as well as a psychiatrist, agrees. "A lot of research is done in academic settings, and a lot of people who get seen there are sicker," she said. "And if you're working in a state hospital, all you ever see are the sickest patients."

Psychiatrists traditionally have not made a distinction between symptoms and the ability to function, Cournos added. "It's important to remember that there is a difference between the two. We've had patients here who are very high-functioning and psychotic, including a woman who ran a very high-powered executive program but at work wouldn't write anything down. She coped by memorizing everything she had to do because it drowned out the voices."

Tale of Two Former Patients

The lives of Dan Fisher and Moe Armstrong illustrate the possibilities of recovery. The two men have a lot a lot in common: They are neighbors in Cambridge, Mass., they are the same age, they both work with psychiatric patients, are well-known mental health advocates and they both have been hospitalized for schizophrenia. By any measure, Fisher has recovered completely. Armstrong is the first to say he has not.

Fisher's unusual odyssey from schizophrenic to psychiatrist embodies the most optimistic vision of recovery.

For the past 28 years, Fisher said, he has taken no psychiatric medication. He has not been hospitalized since 1974, when he spent two weeks at Washington's Sibley Hospital. He has been married for 23 years, is the father of two teenagers and shuttles between a community mental health center where he has worked as a psychiatrist for 15 years and the National Empowerment Center, a nonprofit consumer organization he helped found a decade ago. A few weeks ago he attended a White House meeting on disability issues.

Fisher was first diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1969. Armed with an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin, he was 25 and investigating dopamine and its role in schizophrenia at the National Institute of Mental Health when he suffered his first psychotic break.

"I put more and more energy into my work, and I literally felt that I was the chemical I was studying," said Fisher, who recalled that he was desperately unhappy and that his first marriage was unraveling. "And the more I believed my life was being run by chemicals, the more suicidal I felt." He was hospitalized briefly at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where his father was on the medical faculty, given Thorazine, a powerful antipsychotic, and soon returned to his lab.

The following year Fisher was hospitalized again, this time for four months at Bethesda Naval Hospital, across the street from his lab. A panel of five psychiatrists diagnosed him as schizophrenic and he left his job. After his discharge from Bethesda, Fisher decided that he had to make some radical changes. He jettisoned his once-promising career as a biochemist and decided, with the encouragement of his psychiatrist and his physician brother-in-law, to become a doctor so he could help people.

In 1976 Fisher graduated from George Washington University School of Medicine, then moved to Boston to complete a psychiatry residency at Harvard. He passed his board exams and began practicing at a state hospital and seeing private patients. In 1980 his career as a consumer advocate was launched when he disclosed his psychiatric history on a Boston TV talk show. A decade later he helped found the National Empowerment Center, a resource center for psychiatric patients funded by the federal Center for Mental Health Services.

"I'm sure it helped me that I came from a professional family and I was educated," Fisher said of the factors that led to his recovery. "What helped me recover was not drugs – which were one tool I used – it was people. I had a psychiatrist who always believed in me, and family and friends who stood by me. Changing my career and following my dream – becoming a doctor – was very important."

Moe Armstrong – Eagle Scout, high school football star, decorated Marine – has come a long way from the nomadic decade that began when he was 21, following his psychiatric discharge from the military after combat in Vietnam.

Between 1965 and 1975, Armstrong said, he lived on the streets of San Francisco, in the rugged mountains of Colombia and in his parents' house in southern Illinois, "where I wore a housecoat and told everyone I was St. Francis."

He received no treatment but developed an addiction to alcohol and drugs.

In the mid-1970s, Armstrong sought mental health treatment through the Veterans Administration. He managed to stop drinking and using drugs and moved to New Mexico, where he graduated from college, earned a master's degree and became known as a mental health consumer advocate.

In 1993 he moved to Boston and became director of consumer affairs for a nonprofit company that provides services to the mentally ill. Six years ago he met his fourth wife, who has also been diagnosed with schizophrenia; the couple lives in an apartment they bought several years ago.

For Armstrong, every day is a struggle. "I have to continually watch myself," said Armstrong, who has taken pains to arrange his life in a way that minimizes the chance of a relapse. He takes antipsychotic medication, eschews movies because they often make him feel "over-amped" and tries to be in "supportive, gentle, loving environments."

"I have many more limitations than other people, and that's very hard," Armstrong said.

"And I had to give up the notion that I would be Moe Armstrong, career soldier, which is what I wanted to be. I think I've recovered as much as I have because I'm still the guy that's the scout, looking for the way out."

Buying Influence

2007-06-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: June 27, 2007

As states begin to require that drug companies disclose their payments to doctors for lectures and other services, a pattern has emerged: psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty.

How this money may be influencing psychiatrists and other doctors has become one of the most contentious issues in health care. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical antipsychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved.

Vermont officials disclosed Tuesday that drug company payments to psychiatrists in the state more than doubled last year, to an average of $45,692 each from $20,835 in 2005. Antipsychotic medicines are among the largest expenses for the state’s Medicaid program

- New York Times article..

Found while surfing

2007-06-25T10:51:00.000-07:00

Tranter & Healy (1998) find there is strong evidence that a discontinuation syndrome exists, though nothing like enough to be able to pinpoint how much of a problem it is.

They reached this conclusion after reviewing much evidence on different fronts, including a review of studies in which neuroleptic drugs had been used to treat non-psychiatric states. These are revealing because, if "psychiatric" symptoms appear when a drug is discontinued, they must be true withdrawal symptoms (as there cannot be relapse). The authors point, for example, to long-neglected evidence from the 1960s, when chlorpromazine (the archetypal neuroleptic drug) was used experimentally to treat TB:

"In the late 1950s, it was discovered that chlorpromazine was tuberculostatic, in vitro. Accordingly, it was given to patients with tuberculosis by Hollister and colleagues. Following six months of treatment with chlorpromazine daily in a placebo-controlled double-blind protocol that produced little effect on the tuberculosis, treatment was discontinued. This led to a withdrawal syndrome in five of 17 subjects. The syndrome was characterised by nausea, vomiting, restlessness and sleeplessness; it could be mitigated by restarting chlorpromazine. This study was the first to show withdrawal effects to an agent that had no abuse potential and also the first to show withdrawal at therapeutic doses"

Overall, this review has profound implications, many relating to issues discussed on this website. Its conclusions mean that the long-term effectiveness of neuroleptics may need to be thoroughly re-evaluated. If withdrawal symptoms have invariably been interpreted as evidence of relapse, the effectiveness of these drugs would have been greatly overestimated over the years.

Child Abuse Contributes to Schizophrenia

2007-04-08T08:19:00.000-07:00

University of Manchester researcher Paul Hammersley and New Zealand clinical psychologist Dr. John Read presented the highly contentious theory that child abuse can cause schizophrenia at several conferences.

Hammersley and Read argue that two-thirds of people diagnosed as schizophrenic have suffered physical or sexual abuse and thus it is shown to be a major, if not the major, cause of the illness. With a proven connection between the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia, they say, many schizophrenic symptoms are actually caused by trauma.
Their evidence includes 40 studies, which revealed childhood or adulthood sexual or physical abuse in the history of the majority of psychiatric patients and a review of 13 studies of schizophrenics found abuse rates from a low of 51% to a high of 97%. Psychiatric patients who report abuse are much more likely to experience hallucinations – flashbacks which have become part of the schizophrenic experience and hallucinations or voices that bully them as their abuser did thus causing paranoia and a mistrust of people close to them.

Read the whole Science Daily article here.

Be Careful When Seeking Professional help

2007-04-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Once you have been diagnosed, it will be impossible to remove a diagnosis
from your medical records, regardless of the haste with which it was applied, or
regardless of whether the diagnosis may be even remotely considered
"correct."

Read famous Doctor Mosher's advice here before you ever take a loved one to a psychiatrist.

Also the chance of misdiagnosis is quite common in the medical profession. Read Because the Doctor Isn't Always Right

The nationwide autopsy rate is low, only 6 percent of deaths are autopsied. But even of that small percentage, Burton says experts find a 40 percent misdiagnosis rate.
"Out of those 40 percent, about 10 to 12 percent are significant. In that -- had that diagnosis known -- been known prior to death, at a minimum, the patient probably could have been discharged alive from the hospital during that hospitalization," she says. What's more, despite all the advances in modern medicine, the rate of misdiagnosis hasn't essentially changed in 100 years.
Dr. Mark Graber studies the problem of misdiagnosis and is the Chief of medical services at the Long Island Veterans hospital. Graber sees the problem of misdiagnosis partly stemming from overconfidence.

"I don't think anybody is really adequately addressing diagnostic errors," Graber says.

There is no requirement to report misdiagnoses and no national data bank. As a result, Graber says there's almost no way to know how often misdiagnosis occurs.

"The problem is the doctors were given to believe -- you can learn all this at one point in time; keep it in your head; and pull it out when you need it," Weed says and adds, "Well, that's just not true."

He says the medical schools are the root of the problem.

Haldol Substituted for other Drugs

2007-02-20T07:25:00.000-08:00

Anti Psychotic Drug Substituted in Internet Purchases

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned that consumers who ordered pills
for depression, anxiety and insomnia over the Internet may have received an
anti- psychotic drug instead.
Haloperidol, a medicine for schizophrenia, was
substituted for Sanofi-Aventis SA's sleeping pill Ambien, Pfizer Inc.'s anti-
anxiety medicine Xanax, Forest Laboratories Inc.'s depression treatment Lexapro
and Wyeth's anxiety drug Ativan, the FDA said today in a statement.