The Huffington Post
By Dr. Ronald Ricker and Dr. Venus Nicolino
September 8, 2010

Today, the use of psychoactive drugs by children (6-17) is all too common, relied on far too much and growing at an alarming rate. It all started in the ’70s.

Memorialized in 1966 by the Rolling Stones’ “Mothers Little Helpers,” it was at that time that our society took the first steps at becoming “Pill Crazy.” Valium and Librium and Quaaludes were “Mother’s Little Helpers. The first drugs to enter the stage. If you couldn’t stand Johnny, your friends, your husband, in-laws, etc, tranquilizers smoothed you out, made you tranquil. Not surprisingly, in the 70s, the consumption of these tranquilizers, once discovered and available, skyrocketed. Anxiety was the popular diagnosis. Antidepressants were beginning to raise their heads as well. Their popularity at that time, however, was muted by the fact that they didn’t work well, and also sported many side effects, some of which were very annoying and occasionally dangerous. And, no one knew what was just around the corner.

Prozac

Prozac was first marketed in 1987. It was a totally new type of antidepressant, which seemed to work and had far less side effects. What had been a stream of tranquilizers became a tsunami of Prozac’s and tranquilizers. Other ‘Prozac’s’ entered the scene–Zoloft, Celexa, Paxil and Luvox, all vying to take part of Prozac’s market share. Promotion of these drugs by drug manufacturers exploded. Where there had been a surge in the diagnosis of anxiety, now the diagnosis of the decade was ‘depression.’ Housewives by the droves needed and demanded antidepressants and even more tranquilizers. If one was good, two must be better. The pill craze was on.

Diagnoses started to morph. The more the diagnoses, the more opportunities to sell drugs. Anxiety became anxiety neurosis, panic disorder, panic attacks, etc. ‘Depression,’ as a diagnosis, was of course and remains very popular. However, many patients don’t and didn’t like that diagnosis–perhaps it sounded too much like a disease. So a new depression explanation and diagnosis emerged–’chemical imbalance,’ which sounded more sheik and less like a disease and, of course, yielded more customers.

Not far behind ‘chemical imbalance’ came ‘mood disorder,’ a special type of depression, also called bipolar disorder. There are people who actually have a bipolar disorder and require numerous special medications for treatment. These medications, mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and second generation antipsychotics are far more dangerous medications than Prozac and tranquilizers. Further, there are also many people who are said to have ‘bipolar disorder’ who don’t. Often these patients are those who were said to be depressed yet don’t get better with standard antidepressants. They get all the special and dangerous medications (the number of which is multiplying geometrically) and have the additional advantage of being able to excuse pretty much anything they do as a result of their ‘mood disorder.’

This pretty well takes us through the ’90s. But here come our children. How did our children get sucked into all this? Our pill craze was and is a huge part. Parents and physicians often subscribe to this theory, that there is a pill for everything. Mommy says Johnnie is depressed, doctor agrees, Johnnie doesn’t. Guess who wins? Certainly not Johnny. Guess what Johnnie gets? A pill, usually an SSRI, which he may end up taking for a long time. Assuming Johnnie takes three years of SSRI therapy, his diagnosis is changed 25 percent of the time, usually to the much more serious diagnosis, bipolar disorder. His medications are changed to a much more serious and dangerous types. If Johnny takes an SSRI for six years the chances of his diagnosis changing to bipolar increases to 50 percent. So do his meds.

There’s yet another and newer mine field for Johnnie to negotiate, new in the last two decades. Let’s say Johnnie fidgets in his seat, doesn’t listen to the teacher, hates to read, and talks to his neighbor all the time. Guess what. Johnnie is diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and given another serious type of drug, a stimulant–usually Ritalin or a form of speed (one example being Adderall). Did you know that Adderall is 100 percent speed? We know speed kills but give it to our children. Think about that. Speed kills and we give speed to our children, masked as Adderall.  Astounding.

Read entire article here:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-ronald-ricker-and-dr-venus-nicolino/psychotropic-drugs-our-ch_b_680488.html

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by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) Nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis according to a CDC report that was just released (1). Nearly a third of Americans use two or more drugs, and more than one in ten use five or more prescription drugs regularly.

The report also revealed that one in five children are being regularly given prescription drugs, and nine out of ten seniors are on drugs.

All these drugs came at a cost of over $234 billion in 2008. The most commonly-used drugs were:

• Statin drugs for older people
• Asthma drugs for children
• Antidepressants for middle-aged people
• Amphetamine stimulants for children

America has become a nation of druggies. The seniors are being drugged for nearly every symptom a doctor can find, children are being doped up with (legalized) speed, and middle-aged soccer moms are popping suicide pills (antidepressants).

Prescription drug addictions are on the rise, too. Prescription drugs are so dangerous that now even the DEA is hosting “take back your pills” day allowing citizens to anonymously surrender their unused prescription painkillers to DEA agents. (http://www.herald-dispatch.com/news…)

Interestingly, DEA agents will only accept “legal” amphetamine drugs such as Ritalin but not “illegal” methamphetamine drugs. You’re only off the hook if you paid monopoly prescription prices for your drugs.

And it’s only going to get worse

The percentage of Americans taking prescription drugs is expected to rise even further as the health reform insurance regulations kick in. Much of the bill was specifically designed to favor pharmaceutical industry interests by putting even more people on medication. Expect to see more “screening” too — a thinly disguised drug recruitment method that primarily seeks to ensnare new patients in a high-profit drug regimen.

The mass medication of American citizens has reached a disturbing tipping point where the future of the nation itself is at risk. That’s because pharmaceuticals cause cognitive decline, and once you get to the point where over 50 percent of the voters can’t think straight, you’re trapped in a crumbling Democracy.

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the financial cost of America’s addiction to drugs: With nearly one out of every five dollars out of the entire U.S. economy now being spent on sickness and disease, America finds herself stuck in a cycle of high-cost drug treatments that cure no one.

That’s right: No one gets healthier from taking prescription drugs. They don’t cure anyone and they don’t prevent disease. They only maintain patients in a kind of “pre-death stasis” where they’re alive just enough to keep buying more medication. Drug companies don’t want you dead because that would cut off their profits. But they don’t want you healthy, either, because then they wouldn’t have you as a customer. So their drugs are actually designed to keep you in a state of ongoing disease without curing your condition but also without killing you outright.

You sort of chemically limp along, shelling out dollars while your memory fades and your skin starts to show signs of severe toxicity. Big Pharma is not merely sapping the life out of you; it’s also draining you financially.

Isn’t it obvious that pharmaceuticals don’t work?

If pharmaceuticals really worked to make people healthy, then the half of America currently taking pharmaceuticals would be the healthiest half, and the people who don’t take pharmaceuticals would be unhealthy, right?

But in fact it’s the other way around: People who take pharmaceuticals remain unhealthy and really never get cured of anything. Meanwhile, those who avoid taking pharmaceuticals are, by and large, far healthier individuals.

If America were running a grand experiment to determine whether pharmaceuticals really work — and trust me, the country really is running precisely that experiment — any reasonable observer would have to conclude that pharmaceuticals really don’t improve the health of those who take them. The more pharmaceuticals you take, in fact, the sicker you will become. That’s because drugs cause an imbalance in the body that soon leads to the emergence of other side effects.

At the same time, many of the drugs people take actually cause the very things they claim to prevent. Osteoporosis drugs cause hip fractures. Cancer drugs cause cancer. Antidepressants cause suicidal thoughts. The list goes on and on.

Read the rest of this article here:  http://www.naturalnews.com/029664_prescription_drugs_Americans.html

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The Navy Times

by Andrew Tilghman and Brendan McGarry
Friday Sep 3, 2010

Use of psychiatric medications among people ages 18 to 34 — mostly active-duty troops and their spouses — is rising at a significantly higher rate than other age groups in the military health care system, according to data newly released to Military Times.

Overall, the number of prescriptions filled for psychiatric medications rose 42 percent from 2005 to 2009 among Tricare beneficiaries in that age group, according to data provided by Tricare Management Activity in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

That compares to an increase of 24 percent among Tricare beneficiaries ages 45 to 64, mostly retirees. For children 17 and younger, the increase was 18 percent.

All the increases outpace overall growth in the Tricare population over the same period.

Anti-depressants like Zoloft, Wellbutrin and Celexa account for slightly more than half of the prescriptions in this age group. But increasingly, young adults in the military and their spouses are turning to other types of psych meds to treat their mental health problems.

Prescriptions for stimulants, including amphetamines and drugs to treat attention-deficit disorders, more than doubled. And claims for anti-psychotics like Seroquel and Abilify nearly doubled from 2005 to 2009 among beneficiaries ages 18 to 34, the Tricare data show. Seroquel is often used to treat nightmares and sleeping problems related to post-traumatic stress disorder.

The rise — and potential dangers — of psychiatric drug use is a growing concern for many military officials and doctors.

The Army also should “conduct comprehensive research and analysis of the impact of increased use of antidepressant, psychiatric and narcotic pain management medications on the force,” the report said.

Last year, the Army issued a series of policies designed to reduce the risks linked to multi-drug use. Another policy is expected out later this year.

Military death records obtained by Military Times show that at least 68 accidental drug deaths in 2009, up from 24 in 2001. In total, at least 430 troops have died from drug use — or, in a small number of cases, alcohol use — in the past decade.

Read the rest of this article here:  http://www.navytimes.com/news/2010/09/military-psych-meds-080910/

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Rense.com
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
August 25, 2010

Tens of millions of innocent, unsuspecting Americans, who are mired deeply in the mental “health” system, have actually been made crazy by the use of or the withdrawal from commonly-prescribed, brain-altering, brain-disabling, indeed brain-damaging psychiatric drugs that have been, for many decades, cavalierly handed out like candy ­ often in untested and therefore unapproved combinations of drugs – to trusting and unaware patients by equally unaware but well-intentioned physicians who have been under the mesmerizing influence of slick and obscenely profitable psychopharmaceutical drug companies aka, BigPharma.

That is the conclusion of two books by investigative journalist and health science writer Robert Whitaker. His first book, entitled Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill noted that there has been a 600% increase (since Thorazine was introduced in the US in the mid-1950s) in the total and permanent disabilities of millions of psychiatric drug-takers. This uniquely First World mental ill health epidemic has resulted in the life-long taxpayer-supported disabilities of rapidly increasing numbers of psychiatric patients who are now unable to be happy, productive, taxpaying members of society. Whitaker has done a powerful, albeit unwelcome job of presenting previously hidden, but very convincing evidence to support his thesis, that it is the drugs and not the diagnosis that is causing the epidemic of mental illness disability. Many open-minded physicians and many aware psychiatric patients are now motivated to be wary of any and all synthetic chemicals that can cross the blood/brain barrier because all of them are capable of altering the brain in ways totally unknown to medical science, especially when the patients are taking the drugs long-term..

In Whitaker’s second book Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, he goes much further in advancing this sobering reality. He documents the history of the powerful forces behind the relatively new field of psychopharmacology and its major shaper and beneficiary, BigPharma. Psychiatric drugs, whose developers, marketers and salespersons are all in the employ of the giant drug companies, are far more dangerous than the drug and psychiatric industries are willing to admit: These drugs, it turns our, are fully capable of disabling ­ often permanently – body, brain and spirit.

More evidence to support Whitaker’s well-documented claims are laid out in two important new books written by psychiatrist and scholar Grace Jackson. Jackson did a beautiful job of researching and documenting, from the voluminous basic neuroscience research (which is uniformly ignored by the clinical sciences) the unintended and often disastrous consequences of the chronic ingestion of any of the five major classes of psychiatric drugs. Her second and most powerful book: Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any of the five classes of drugs that are commonly used in psychiatric patients (antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, tranquilizers and anti-seizure/”mood-stabilizer” drugs) have shown microscopic, macroscopic, biochemical, clinical and/or radiological evidence of brain shrinkage and other signs of brain damage, which can result in clinically-diagnosable, permanent dementia, premature death and a variety of other related brain disorders that can mimic mental illnesses. Jackson’s first book, Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent was an equally sobering book warning about the many hidden dangers of psychiatric drugs.

This sad truth is that the seemingly knee-jerk prescribing (without very much information being given to patients about the long list of serious long-term adverse effects) of potent and often addicting/dependency-inducing psychiatric drugs has become the standard of care in American psychiatry since the introduction of the so-called anti-schizophrenic “miracle” drug Thorazine in the mid-1950s. (Thorazine was the offending drug that all of Jack Nicholson’s fellow patients were coerced into taking at “medication time” in the Academy Award-winning movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.) Thorazine and all the other “me-too” early antipsychotic drugs are now universally known to have been an iatrogenic (= doctor or other treatment-caused) disaster because of their serious long-term, initially unsuspected, brain-damaging effects that resulted in a number of incurable neurological disorders such as tardive dyskinesia and Parkinson’s disease.

Thorazine and all the other knock-off drugs like Prolixin, Mellaril, Navane. etc, are synthetic “tricyclic” chemical compounds similar in molecular structure to the tricyclic “antidepressants” like imipramine and the similarly toxic, obesity-inducing, diabetogenic, “atypical” anti-schizophrenic drugs like Clozaril, Zyprexa and Seroquel.

Thorazine, incidentally, was originally developed in Europe as an industrial dye. That doesn’t sound so good although it may not be so unusual in the closely related fields of psychopharmcology and the chemical industry, especially when one considers that Depakote, a popular drug marketed initially as an anti-epilepsy drug but now is being heavily used as a so-called “mood stabilizer”. Depakote, known to be a hepatotoxin and renal toxin, was originally developed as an industrial solvent capable of dissolving fat – including, presumably, the fatty tissue in human livers and brains.

Some sympathy and understanding needs to be generated for the various victims of BigPharma’s compulsive drive to expand market share and “shareholder value” (share price, dividends and the next quarter’s financial report) by whatever means necessary. Both the prescribers and the swallowers of BigPharma’s drugs have succumbed to BigPharma’s cunning marketing campaigns, the prescribers having been seduced by attractive drug company representatives and their “pens, pizzas and post-it note” freebies in the office, and the patients being brain-washed by the inane and unbelievable (if one has intact critical thinking skills) commercials on TV that quickly gloss over the lethal adverse effects in the fine print while urging the watcher to “ask your doctor” about the latest unaffordable wannabe blockbuster drug..

For a quick overview of these issues, I recommend that everybody with an open mind read a long essay written by Whitaker that persuasively identifies the source of America’s epidemic of mental illness disability (a phenomenon that doesn’t exist in Third World nations because costly psych drugs are not prescribed so cavalierly as in the US).

Whitaker and Jackson (among a number of other ground-breaking and whistle-blowing authors who have been essentially black-listed by the mainstream media and mainstream medical journals) have proven to most critically-thinking scientists, alternative practitioners and assorted “psychiatric survivors” that it is the drugs – and not the so-called “disorders” – that are causing our nation’s epidemic of mental illness disability. The Whitaker essay, plus other pertinent information about his books can be accessed at www.madinamerica.com A recent interview on Wisconsin Public Radio can be accessed at www.wpr.org (at their radio archives link) and a long interview with Dr.Joseph Mercola can be heard at: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/05/08/robert-whitaker-interview.aspx

After reading and studying all these inconvenient truths, mental health practitioners must consider the medicolegal implications for them, especially if the information is ignored or if the information is dismissed out of hand by practitioners who might be tempted to not take the time to study this new information. Those people who are hearing about this for the first time need to pass the word on to others, especially their prescribing healthcare practitioners who should be equally concerned. This is important because the opinion leaders in the highly influential (for good or ill) psychiatric and medical industries have been marketed into submission without hearing the all the facts (which may have been intentionally hidden from them. If that is the case, they cannot be automatically blamed for proceeding in a practice that some day might represent malpractice. It shouldn’t have to be pointed out that is the solemn duty of ethical practitioners who are in positions of authority to fully examine potential malpractice issues and then warn others, especially their patients, of the dangers.

Sadly, it must be admitted that most of the over-worked, double-booked care-givers in medical clinics have not yet heard the news that most if not all of the brain-altering synthetic chemicals known as psychotropic drugs (which are treated as hazardous waste unless they are packaged in a swallowable capsule!) have been marketed as safe and effective – but only for short-term use. The captains of the drug industry know that the psychotropic drugs that they present for the FDA-approval have only been tested in animal trials for days and in clinical trials for 6 weeks. They also know ­ indeed they hope – that patients will be taking their drugs for years (despite no long-term trials proving safety and efficacy) as the only “treatment” for mental ill health. They know that their brain-altering drugs are also dependency-inducing (aka addicting, causing withdrawal symptoms when stopped), neurotoxic and increasingly ineffective (a la “Prozac Poop-out”) as time goes by.

The truth is that the people diagnosed as “mentally ill” for life are often simply those unfortunates who find themselves in acute or chronic states of crisis or “overwhelm” due to any number of preventable, curable and treatable (without the use of drugs) bad luck accidents such as poverty, abuse, violence, torture, homelessness, discrimination, underemployment, brain malnutrition, addictions/withdrawal, brain damage from electroshock “therapy” and/or exposure to neurotoxic chemicals in their food, air, water or prescription bottles.

Those labeled as the “mentally ill” are just like us “normals” who have not yet decompensated because of some yet-to-happen, crisis-inducing, overwhelming (however temporary) life situation. And thus we have not yet been given a billable code number (accompanied by the seemingly obligatory – and unaffordable – drug prescription or two signifying we are now chronically mentally ill. Unlabeled, we are likely to remain off prescription drugs but with a label and in “the system”, it is hard to “just say no to drugs.”

The victims of hopelessness-generating situations like simple bad luck, bad circumstances, bad company, bad choices, bad government, big business, and a competitive society that generates a few winners but mostly losers. America tolerates, indeed celebrates, punitive and thus fear-inducing social systems resembling in many ways the infamous police state realities of 20th century European totalitarianism, where people who were different or just dissidents were thought to be abnormal and therefore “disappeared” into insane asylums, jails or concentration camps without just cause or competent legal defense. And many of them were and are drugged with disabling psychoactive chemicals against their will.

The truth is that most, if not all, of BigPharma’s psychotropic drugs are lethal at some dosage level (the LD50, the lethal dose that kills 50% of lab animals, is calculated before efficacy testing is done), and therefore the drugs must be regarded as dangerous. The chronic use of these drugs is a major cause of cognitive disorders, brain damage, loss of creativity, loss of spirituality, loss of empathy, loss of energy, loss of strength, fatigue and tiredness, permanent disability and a multitude of metabolic adverse effects that can readily sicken the body, brain and soul by causing insomnia or somnolence, increased depression or anxiety, delusions, psychoses, paranoia, mania, etc. So before filling the prescription, it is advisable to read the product insert labeling under WARNINGS, PRECAUTIONS, ADVERSE EFFECTS, CONTRAINDICATIONS, TOXICOLOGY, OVERDOSAGE and the ever-present BLACK BOX WARNINGS ABOUT SUICIDALITY.

Long-term, high dosage or combination psychotropic drug usage could be regarded as a chemically traumatic brain injury (TBI) or, as drugs like Thorazine were known in the 1950s and 60s, a “chemical lobotomy”. That is a useful way to conceptualize this serious issue, because such chemically brain-altered patients are often indistinguishable from those who have suffered a physically traumatic brain injuries or been subjected to ice-pick lobotomies which were popular in the 1940s and 50s – before the drugs came on the market.

America has a mental ill health epidemic on its hands that is grossly misunderstood because it is worsening, not by the supposed disease progression, but because of the neurotoxic, non-curative drugs that are somehow regarded as first-line “treatment.”
Read the rest of this article here: http://www.rense.com/general91/edi.htm

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Medscape
By Deborah Brauser
August 24, 2010

A new review of 4 meta-analyses of efficacy trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) suggests that antidepressants are only “marginally efficacious” compared with placebo and “document profound publication bias that inflates their apparent efficacy.”

In addition, when the researchers also analyzed the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) trial, “the largest antidepressant effectiveness trial ever conducted,” they found that “the effectiveness of antidepressant therapies was probably even lower than the modest one reported…with an apparent progressively increasing dropout rate across each study phase.

“We found that out of the 4041 patients initially started on the SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor] citalopram in the STAR*D study, and after 4 trials, only 108 patients had a remission and did not either have a relapse and/or dropped out by the end of 12 months of continuing care,” lead study author Ed Pigott, PhD, a psychologist with NeuroAdvantage LLC in Clarksville, Maryland, told Medscape Medical News.

Sustained Benefit “Jaw Dropping”

“In other words, if you’re trying to look at sustained benefit, you’re only looking at 2.7%, which is a pretty jaw-dropping number,” added Dr. Pigott.

Overall, “the reviewed findings argue for a reappraisal of the current recommended standard of care of depression,” write the study authors.

“I believe there are likely some people where [antidepressants] are truly beneficial beyond placebo. The problem right now is that we simply have no way of knowing who those people are,” noted Dr. Pigott. “My hope is that this kind of analysis creates ‘more oxygen’ for looking at other kinds of approaches to treatment.”

The study was published in the August issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.

When registering new drug application trials with the FDA, drug companies must prespecify the primary and secondary outcome measures, the investigators report. “Prespecification is essential to ensure the integrity of a trial and enables the discovery of when investigators selectively publish the measures that show the outcome the sponsors prefer following data collection and analysis, a form of researcher bias known as HARKing or ‘hypothesizing after the results are known’,” they write.

For this article, Dr. Pigott and his team reviewed the following meta-analyses:

• 1. Rising and colleagues (reviewed all efficacy trials for new drugs between 2001 and 2002)
• 2. Turner and colleagues (reviewed 74 past trials of 12 antidepressants)
• 3. Kirsch and colleagues, 2002 (reviewed 47 trials of 6 FDA-approved antidepressants)
• 4. Kirsch and colleagues, 2008 (reviewed depression severity and efficacy in 35 trials)

The researchers also sought to reevaluate the methods and findings of STAR*D, a randomized, controlled trial of patients with depression. Its prespecified primary outcome measure was the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD), whereas the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology–Clinician-Rated (IDS-C30) was secondary for identifying remitted and responder patients.

“STAR*D was designed to identify the best next-step treatment for the many patients who fail to get adequate relief from their initial SSRI trial,” the study authors write.

“When I first read about STAR*D’s step 1 phase, it just seemed biased to me,” explained Dr. Pigott. “I thought of it as the ‘tag, you’re healed’ research design. Patients who were scored as having a remission during the first 4 to 6 weeks of up to 14 weeks of acute care treatment were counted as remitted, taken out of the subject pool, and put into the follow-up care phase. In other words, they didn’t have the ability to have a relapse. But as most people know, depression ebbs and flows.

“So what made me want to continue to follow this study was that it became clear that the only way that people were really going to be able to evaluate the antidepressants’ effectiveness was to wait for the publication of the follow-up findings,” he added. “After their major final summary study was published, I felt as though the results weren’t really being portrayed in a manner that was consistent with the study’s prespecified criteria.”

High Dropout, Low Remission Rates

In addition to reporting on low efficacy of antidepressants compared with placebo, the 4 meta-analyses “also document a second form of bias in which researchers fail to report the negative results for the prespecified primary outcome measure submitted to the FDA, while highlighting in published studies positive results from a secondary or even a new measure, as though it was their primary measure of interest,” the investigators write.

For example, they note, the meta-analysis from Rising and colleagues found that studies with favorable outcomes were almost 5 times more likely to be published and that over 26% of primary outcome measures were left out of journal articles. Turner and colleagues found that antidepressant studies were 16 times more likely to be published if favorable compared with those with unfavorable outcomes.

In reanalyzing the STAR*D methods, the researchers found that the high dropout rate resulted in frequently missed exit HRSD and IDS-C30 interviews. So the revised statistical analytical plan dropped the IDS-30 for the Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology-Self Report (QIDS-SR), which was given at each visit.

“Even with the extraordinary care of STAR*D, only about one fourth of patients achieved remission in step 1 [and] the dropout rate was slightly larger than the success rate,” the study authors write. Steps 2 through 4 also each showed increasingly fewer success rates and larger dropout rates.

Of the 4041 patients at the study’s initiation, 370 (9.2%) dropped out within 2 weeks, and only 1854 patients (45.9%) obtained remission “using the lenient QIDS-SR criteria.” Of these, 670 dropped out within a month of their remission, and only 108 “survived continuing care” and underwent the final assessment.

Dr. Pigott described reanalyzing STAR*D as being “a bit like an onion. Each time we thought we understood the results, we found another layer. It wasn’t until about a year and a half ago that we discovered that the secondary outcome measure, the QIDS-SR, was not originally supposed to be used as a research measure. What was particularly disconcerting to me was that in their summary article, they basically used the QIDS-SR to report all of the results, which clearly had an inflationary effect on the outcome.”

He also noted that STAR*D did not have a placebo design. “Because the patients knew they were receiving the active medication, I would have expected a higher remission rate than what you’d find normally in a placebo-controlled study.

“The inescapable conclusion from the STAR*D results is that we need to explore more seriously other forms of treatment (and combination thereof) that may be more effective. This effort will require developing new service delivery models to ensure that as treatments are identified, they are widely implemented,” the investigators conclude.

Read entire article here:  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/727323
(Free registration required)

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The Asian Tribune, August 21, 2010

By Shenali Waduge

They say there’s no money in healthy people. But, why is the pharmaceutical industry the most profitable industry in the world? It is because they have mastered the art of concocting the disorder, creating the drug for the disorder and then bombarding the public with advertisements to convince them they’re afflicted, leaving little choice but to get “prescribed”.

The growth in the pharmaceutical industry began to expand towards the 1970s. Pharmaceutical companies began to form mutual partnerships and began dominating the production of medicines. Advertising boomed making it possible for consumers to be enticed into believing there were miracle cures or drugs that would make people look young forever, increase sexual libido, maintain youthful looking skin with zero after effects or side effects.

Companies spend billions on “inventing” new drugs…they also spend billions on marketing them, USD53billion to be precise. But, how “innovative” are these companies? Most research and clinical trials are carried out at universities and funded by Governments. What happens thereafter is that drug companies “buy these innovations” and quickly patent them and quickly set up manufacturing plants. The only “innovation” done by these companies is to modify the existing drug something as minor as changing the color of the coating! A patented drug generally lasts for 20 years. It is only after rigorous study and testing which takes a good 10 to 15 years that Governmental authorities grant permission to market and sell drugs.

Loopholes in patent systems ensure companies are able to keep generic competitors at bay for years. These patented branded drugs naturally provides high profit margins but before the patent expires and competitors enter with a generic drug sold at far lesser prices, owners of branded drugs put out a generic version before the branded version expires…giving his company a head start in the sale of generic drugs. In 2006, the world had spent US$643billion on prescription drugs with US accounting for almost half of global pharmaceutical market. The US pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable of all businesses in the US.

It would not surprise anyone that companies spent up to $11billion annually on free samples, $6billion on sales representatives, $3billion on vague advertisements, we can only guess how many more billions is spent on bribing doctors, bribing researchers, bribing universities, bribing health officers, pharmacists, providing kickbacks and even running bogus “medical education” programs.

Essentially, what drug companies’ end up doing is using tax payer’s money to pay for medical research which they buy off, they then spend on massive advertising campaigns aimed at misleading the public about the effects of these drugs and “encourage” doctors to prescribe them!

Year in and year out drug companies end up the most successful industry with stunning profits part of which are used to buy off politicians and further promote themselves as champions of social responsibility and good corporate ethics!

There are no business ethics in the pharmaceutical industry – the industry is synonymous with money, profits, power and control. Pharmaceutical companies have mastered how to market social phobia/anxiety disorders in order to sell mind altering drugs. Does it not surprise and make you wonder why scores of people are being treated for mental disorders?

There are teenagers on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics because pharmaceutical companies want to ensure they have customers for life! Some prescription drugs are sold at more than 500,000% markup over the actual cost of their raw ingredients, naturally drug companies will do anything to sell more pills and it is why they end up inventing fictitious diseases and force parents to make addicts out of their children. There are scores of drugs available that are “habit-forming” tranquilizers?

Despite the number of drugs available why are people sicker than ever? Drugs have not helped people instead drug companies have made people addicted to drugs and suffering further from the side-affects of taking so many different combinations of drugs. In the US, over 100,000 Americans die annually from prescription drugs while a further 2million are injured by them.

The dominating companies in global pharmaceutical industry today are MERCK, Roche (fined in the US and Europe for participating in illegal price fixing cartel), Pfizer (ranked no.1, the makers of viagra the wonder drug of the 90s…. and probably soon to put out a drug that may do the opposite of viagra!), Bayer the inventor of Asprin….however hundreds and thousands of people die every year from prescription drugs? 27,000 people died of vioxx which is a nosteroidal anti-inflammatory drug which has been withdrawn over safety concerns associated with heart attacks, strokes. (though first approved in 1999 but withdrawn in 2004) It is believed that over 80m worldwide prescribed it in 2003 and its producer Merck and Co made sales revenues of US$2.5billion.

What is ironic is that there is not a single chronic disease which has been cured as a result of taking prescription drugs. What these drugs have done is to only treat the symptoms. Has chemotherapy proved scientifically accurate? It does shrink tumors but it adds nothing to a patient’s lifespan. The world is becoming sicker, fatter and more depressed than ever. The advice that people should listen to is not being given…eat healthy, avoid processed foods, avoid refined carbohydrates, avoid soft drinks etc…are rarely highlighted.

What’s more our doctors are duping us too…! In the US some mid-sized drug companies have close upon 1000 representatives lobby with companies spending over $5billion annually on sending these representatives to physician offices. The US spends $19billion annually on promotions, influencing doctors and other health professionals. As a result the physicians are lured into prescribing drugs associated with particular drug companies who ensure these physicians are well looked after and patients end up paying far more than they are required to as well as end up having to take another set of prescribed drugs to cut off the side-affects associated with the earlier drug!

Doctors are even paid to conduct fraudulent clinical trials on patients who are encouraged to take drugs for a 12month period to see its affects while the drug company profits through that particular year and the doctors enjoy the kickbacks as well. Some doctors who prescribe a particular drug company’s products and avoided competing drugs are even paid “consulting fees”. It is all a scam, and a vast majority of physicians become party to these unethical medical acts, pocketing the benefits & dosing up their patients with whatever drugs they’ve been told to prescribe. Doctors today are recipients of airfares & hotel expenses, luxury vehicles, even repairs and tyre replacements!

What is poignant and significant is that while physicians who may attend academic sessions with the thought of updating their know-how they are at the risk of being manipulated by pharmaceutical companies who pay high-profile scientists/physicians to speak on topics relevant to their products. Similarly, medical journals also help to promote specific products whose manuscripts are written by the pharmaceutical companies.

Essentially the public is at risk as a result of the direct and indirect relationships between pharmaceutical industry and the physicians. It certainly does breach professional ethics and may even bring dangers to patients.

Read the rest of this article here:  http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2010/08/21/doctors-drug-companies-politicians-corruptions

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“The use of Paxil in children became extremely controversial after it emerged that GSK knew for 15 years, but didn’t tell anyone until 2006, that the drug may carry a risk for suicide. The drug now carries a black-box warning for suicide risk in children.”

BNET
By Jim Edwards
August 19, 2010

A crooked doctor who faked data in a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) study of the antidepressant Paxil in children pled guilty to criminal charges today, causing groans among GSK’s senior management as the company hopes to fend off a different criminal investigation into whether it manipulated clinical data on its diabetes drug, Avandia. She was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

The two cases are technically completely separate, but they’re both about data manipulation. GSK has been accused of sitting on data showing risks on both drugs; and the FDA previously shut down one of GSK’s factories where both drugs were made.

Thus, the expected guilty plea of Dr. Maria Carmen Palazzo today is a reminder to managers everywhere that cutting ethical corners can cause unwanted chickens to return to their roosts, even years later.

Palazzo was indicted in 2007 on 40 counts of defrauding Medicare and Medicaid at her New Orleans clinic, and 15 counts of conducting fraudulent clinical trials. The charges followed an FDA accusation that she had enrolled 26 children in studies of Paxil for obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder. She included children in the trial — which was given the cutesey nickname “Kiddie-Sads-Present and Lifetime” — who did not have the diagnoses being studied. GSK gave her more than $5,000 for each child she enrolled.

At trial, Palazzo was convicted on 39 counts of healthcare fraud and was sentenced to 87 months in prison and forfeiture of $655,000. The clinical trial fraud charges were thrown out, but prosecutors appealed and won a ruling this year reinstating those charges. That appears to be the reason Palazzo is reappearing in court to make a plea.

The use of Paxil in children became extremely controversial after it emerged that GSK knew for 15 years, but didn’t tell anyone until 2006, that the drug may carry a risk for suicide. The drug now carries a black-box warning for suicide risk in children.

Read entire article here:  http://www.bnet.com/blog/drug-business/10-years-later-glaxo-still-haunted-by-faked-studies-of-paxil-in-kids/5545

Read more about Palazzo here:
http://medicaresmostwanted.blogspot.com/2007/06/dr-maria-carmen-palazzo-has-been.html

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Read the rest of this article here: http://wvgazette.com/News/201008120975

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The Daily Mail
By Professor Irving Kirsch
August 3, 2010

We spend more than £250 m a year on antidepressants in the UK – and it’s a complete waste of money.

They are not much better than sugar pills, they have nasty side – effects, such as sexual dysfunction, and they increase young people’s risk of suicide.

New research shows they don’t even work on the brain in the way we thought they did.

For years we were told depression was caused by low levels of a brain chemical called serotonin, and that antidepressants worked by boosting it.

But an Australian study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that rather than low levels, depressed people might have double the normal amount in some parts of their brains.

Many people were surprised by these new findings, but I wasn’t.

I’ve been studying antidepressants for more than a decade, and I knew that if they worked at all, it wasn’t by changing brain chemistry.

The major reason you feel better when taking an antidepressant – maybe the only reason – is the placebo effect.

When I first published a paper back in 1998 saying that antidepressant drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat were not much better than a placebo, almost everyone thought it couldn’t be true.

There was so much evidence they worked. Thousands of people claimed the drugs had turned their lives round.

My colleagues said that I must have made a mistake: either I had looked at the wrong data, or I hadn’t analysed it properly.

In fact, what I’d done was to look at the research on antidepressants in a different way from everyone else.

Other researchers were concentrating on how much better the drugs were than a placebo.

What I was interested in was finding out how strong the placebo effect was in treating depression.

I compared the placebo effect to having no treatment at all – no one had done that before.

We already knew that placebos could have a powerful effect in conditions such as pain, angina, ulcers and asthma.

Depression was an obvious next step, because when you are depressed you lose hope, and placebos give you hope.

But I was flabbergasted by just how big the placebo effect was.

Read entire article here:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1299791/Why-antidepressants-simply-confidence-trick-A-leading-psychologist-claims-taking-sugar-pills-work-just-well.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

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USA Today
By Lou A. Murphy
August 3, 2010

Antidepressants can increase the risk of suicide or suicidal behavior in certain population groups. The warning required by the Food and Drug Administration on antidepressants states that children and young adults up to age 25 are particularly at risk.

In 2008, Time magazine published the article “America’s Medicated Army.” At that time, it was estimated that 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% in Afghanistan were taking antidepressants or sleeping pills.

Antidepressants alter the brain in ways not fully understood.

Read entire article here:  http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/letters/2010-08-04-letters04_ST2_N.htm

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