Posts Tagged ‘pharmaceutical companies’

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Diagnoses aren’t the quick fix people think they are

Friday, November 12th, 2010

The Spectator, November 11, 2010

by Haley Zblewski

psychiatric drug side effects fda medwatch antidepressants antipsychotics stimulants

More and more people, especially young adults, are being diagnosed with some sort of mental disorder.

From depression and anxiety, to Attention Deficit Disorder and bipolar disorder, mental disorder diagnoses are convenient. They sum up all of our problems on a prescription bottle filled with pills that will fix everything.

Pharmaceutical companies obviously want to sell their drugs, but the selling involves deceiving the consumer. They have to sell the illness first. They present advertisements that say, “Do you have symptoms A and B? Well, this is what’s wrong with you.” It offers consumers a solution to their everyday problems. But let’s face it; when it comes to the symptoms presented by the commercials you see while watching TV, we probably all feel them at some point.

Do you ever feel sad? Tired for no reason? Do you feel this way often? You’re probably depressed … or maybe you’re just a college student.

Feel awkward speaking in front of a crowd? Do you dislike being in crowds altogether? You must have some sort of anxiety disorder … or maybe you’re just human.

Doctors want to diagnose their patients with something. It’s what the patients expect – answers. And let’s not forget that doctors make money from the pharmaceutical companies for prescribing pills.

This deception by pharmaceutical companies and doctors about the be-all, end-all cures is what allows parents and young adults to go along with the idea that it’s OK to pop pills.

I mean, in a world where we want everything handed to us as soon as it’s needed, a world that runs on fast food and cell phones, it really isn’t surprising that being medicated isn’t really taboo anymore.

Parents almost want something to be wrong with their children. They want reasoning behind the behaviors of their children. Behaviors that are, well, typical of kids today. A diagnosis gives the parents all the proof they need to tell them it wasn’t their parenting skills, but that something’s wrong with their kid. It takes the blame away from parents.

Moods that go up and down, not paying attention in class, being sad or angry for no apparent reason; that’s just the way young people act. It shouldn’t have to be defined as a mental disorder.

What’s more is that there seems to be a cool factor that comes along with it for the younger generation. Disorders that were once taboo are now a means for bragging rights. Young adults say to their friends “I live with this everyday,” as though other problems are dwarfed by it. As though they are brave and superhuman for getting out of bed every morning. There’s a sort of mystery that comes along with taking pills. Think about it. When you see someone taking some nameless medication, don’t you think to yourself “Ohhh, I wonder what’s wrong with them”?

Mental disorders can also be a good excuse to not show up to class or hand in an assignment or to go to work. “It’s not that I didn’t finish my paper, professor. My depression was acting up and I was having a hard time dealing with it.”

These diagnoses are allowing people to label themselves as sick, when for many that’s far from the case.

With the taboo of being “crazy” having been lifted, we’ve just seen an increase of laziness, and, strangely enough, it has created people who think respect and compromises should be bent in their own direction.

A diagnosis does not fix all of your problems; in some instances, it only allows you to hide from them.

http://media.www.spectatornews.com/media/storage/paper218/news/2010/11/11/Editorialopinion/Haleys.Comments.Diagnoses.Arent.The.Quick.Fix.People.Think.They.Are-3957358-page2.shtml

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Drug Industry’s Boast of Ethics Rings Hollow

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

The Star Phoenix, September 16, 2010

by Mark Lemstra

Russell Williams, president of Canada’s Pharmaceutical Companies, recently wrote an opinion piece criticizing a series of articles that I wrote on antidepressants. His article was headlined: “Drug industry ethical standards high.”

Curiously, Williams did not address my concern that a review from the United States Food and Drug Administration found that antidepressants not only have no benefit in children, but are associated with a 50 per cent increase in suicidal behaviour.

Regrettably, these negative results were buried by the drug companies. In an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, titled Drug Company Experts Advised Staff to Withhold Data about SSRI Use in Children, and a separate editorial in The Lancet, titled Depressing Research, the authors express regret that drug companies put profits ahead of preventing suicides among children.

I fail to see the high ethical standards in these actions. In fact, it would be easy to list all of the unethical activity by pharmaceutical companies, but this would take a whole book. Instead, let’s discuss one specific example in detail.

Read more: http://www.thestarphoenix.com/health/Drug+industry+boast+ethics+rings+hollow/3532133/story.html#ixzz0zi3tRIIc

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/health/Drug+industry+boast+ethics+rings+hollow/3532133/story.html

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NY Times—U.S. Broadens Bribery Inquiry Into Drug Makers—Federal Prosecutors Investigating Payments Made to Doctors

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

The New York Times
By Gardiner Harris and Natasha Singer
August 13, 2010

At least a dozen major drug and device makers are under investigation by federal prosecutors and securities regulators in a broadening bribery inquiry into whether the companies made illegal payments to doctors and health officials in foreign countries.

In previous investigations, federal officials have charged that some companies made these kinds of payments to encourage doctors abroad to order or prescribe their products. In the United States, companies routinely hire doctors as consultants to market drugs and devices to their colleagues and other health professionals at medical conventions and small gatherings. Such consulting arrangements are legal in the United States as long as the companies do not pay doctors directly to write prescriptions for their products.

But in much of the rest of the world, doctors are government employees. And even consulting arrangements that would be considered routine in the United States might violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, particularly if the payments are outsize or the arrangements are not disclosed to the governments.

Of even greater concern to prosecutors in the United States are unusually large payments made to foreign doctors who oversee the growing number of clinical trials that drug and device makers conduct abroad, according to Kirk Ogrosky, a former top federal prosecutor who now represents drug and device makers at a Washington law firm.

More than 80 percent of the drugs approved for sale in 2008 involved trials in foreign countries, and 78 percent of all people who participated in clinical trials were enrolled at foreign sites, according to a recent investigation by Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. Medical ethicists have long worried that many of these trials are conducted in countries that federal auditors rarely visit and where research controls may be scant.

Now, prosecutors are investigating whether the payments made to doctors who conducted these studies abroad were appropriate. If evidence shows that such payments have influenced the results of some clinical trials, prosecutors will be inspecting the trials closely, Mr. Ogrosky said. An article about the inquiry appeared Friday in The Financial Times.

Last month, a federal drug official reported that he found repeated instances in a landmark clinical trial of Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, in which patients taking Avandia appeared to suffer serious heart problems that were not counted in the study’s crucial tally of adverse events. Many of the study’s trial sites were in foreign countries, and the study is a main reason that Avandia remains on the market in the United States. Government officials have not accused GlaxoSmithKline, the trial’s sponsor, of fraud.

“At the Justice Department, investigations that involve allegations of patient harm rise straight to the top and will attract the immediate attention of the F.B.I.,” Mr. Ogrosky said.

Read entire article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/health/policy/14drug.html?_r=2&hp

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People & Power—Drug Money

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

A 23 minute TV expose on Big Pharma by ALJAZEERA (see video at bottom of this page)

This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices  and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.

  • “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.
  • Lewis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”
  • Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states, “Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent,  3-10% of that is believed to be siphoned off into fraud—that’s  money that  could be going to very needy patients.”

Now the U.S. government is fighting back.  In the last two years alone, the  government has fined six of America’s  top ten pharmaceutical companies for fraud.  Investigations are ongoing against another three.  In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history.   ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business.  Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.

Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this.  And leading that pack sits none other than the  [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose.   Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”

This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.

This is one of the best exposé’s on Big Pharma we’ve seen:

People & Power —Drug Money, produced by ALJAZEERA.  This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices  and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.

* “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.

* Louis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”

*Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states,  ”Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent,  3-10% is believed to be siphoned off into fraud that’s  money that  could be going to very needy patients.”

Now the U.S. government is fighting back.  In the last two years alone, the  government has fined six of America’s 10 pharmaceutical companies for fraud.  Investigations are ongoing into another three.  In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history.   ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business.  Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.

Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this.  And leading that pack sits none other than the  [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose.   Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”

This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TwdsYVHjGA&feature=player_embedded#!

This is one of the best exposé’s on Big Pharma we’ve seen:

People & Power —Drug Money, produced by ALJAZEERA.  This piece pulls no punches exposing the rampant fraud, fatal drug side effects, off label marketing, criminal practices  and “absolutely jaw dropping” payouts Pharma makes to psychiatrists/doctors.

* “There is so much money to be made in stealing from the United States Healthcare system,” says Patrick Byrnes, Taxpayers Against Fraud.

* Louis Morris, US Department of Health states, “One of the things we are now looking at is going after the executives in these companies and holding them personally accountable.”

*Sharon Ormsky, FBI Financial Crimes Unit states,  ”Pharmaceutical fraud is one of our top three threats — everybody is touched by these frauds in the extent that when you look at the billions of dollars that go into healthcare for the United States, a good percent,  3-10% is believed to be siphoned off into fraud that’s  money that  could be going to very needy patients.”

Now the U.S. government is fighting back.  In the last two years alone, the  government has fined six of America’s 10 pharmaceutical companies for fraud.  Investigations are ongoing into another three.  In this period the industry has had to pay out over 5 billion dollars in fines, and topping the list is drug giant Pfizer, having recently settled civil & criminal charges resulting in $2.3 billion dollars —the biggest fraud case, the biggest criminal case, the biggest false claims act in U.S. history.   ALJAZEERA also exposes Pfizer’s “interesting way of doing business.  Witnesses in the case revealed just how the company persuaded doctors to prescribe its drugs. It entertained them in strip clubs, it told them that the blues teenagers feel when they don’t make the football team was signs of treatable depression and it paid them to endorse Pfizer drugs. One doctor received $150,000 in a year.

Also highlighted is the current scandal regarding antipsychotic drugs, including state law suits, dangerous documented side effects and how federal investigators are now looking into claims drug company Johnson & Johnson illegally marketed their antipsychotic drug Risperdal to children, paying “some of the most influential doctors in the field” in order to accomplish this.  And leading that pack sits none other than the  [now] infamous psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, who has been “credited” with the huge increase of children prescribed psychiatry’s most powerful/dangerous drugs, antipsychotics, while receiving millions in Pharma kickbacks that he failed to disclose.   Biederman is shown on tape being questioned under oath, and when asked “What rank are you?” Biederman responds, “Full Professor.” When asked “What comes after that?” Biederman responds, “GOD.”

This is a 23 minute expose well worth watching.

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OpEdNews.com—The Mothers Act: How Pharmaceutical’s Control Puts New Mothers & Infants in Grave Danger

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Note: To see side effects of psychiatric drugs on pregnant women that have been reported to the US FDA,  click on this link http://www.cchrint.org/psychdrugdangers/medwatch_psych_drug_adverse_reactions.php scroll all the way down in the Drug Class/Drug Name drop down link and select ANTIDEPRESSANTS, then in the AGE RANGE category, select  age range of 0-1 years.

OpEdNews
By K. L. Carlson
August 5, 2010

Mom’s Opportunity to Access Health, Education, Research, and Support for Postpartum Depression Act sounds very supportive of new mothers. The truth is just the opposite. The cleverly worded title can be shortened to the Mothers Act and it was written by and for the pharmaceutical industry. It was introduced by Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey; the state with the most pharmaceutical companies’ headquarters. According to the public interest group, Common Cause, Senator Menendez received over $2 million from the healthcare industry, including drug companies.

The Mothers Act was included in the immense health plan that was recently signed into law. New mothers need to be made aware that this Act was not written to benefit them, but to benefit the drug companies. This Act will have grave results literally.

Postpartum depression, as defined in the Act, is a “mood disorder” that has three categories. The most severe category is “postpartum psychosis.” Notice the use of psychiatric terms. The public is supposed to believe that motherhood can cause mental illness. Fear of a new mother suffering “postpartum psychosis” is then increased by the Act stating that one in every one thousand new mothers will suffer the mental illness.

The Act states that postpartum depression goes undiagnosed and untreated due to “social stigma surrounding depression and mental illness.” So giving birth and becoming a new mother with vastly fluctuating hormones and physiological changes, as well as the demands of a new baby, is now a mental illness. What is the probability the Mothers Act would have been written if psychiatric drugs did not reap more than $330 billion dollars a year?

The Act establishes federally funded grants to screen all new mothers before they leave their birthing centers and to continue screening during the first year. Although it is unknown why some women suffer depression after giving birth, and most likely there are many reasons including concerns of financially supporting a new baby, the pharmaceutical industry has ensured that it is considered a mental illness that will lead to non-curing, addictive, dangerous psychiatric drugs. As stated in the Act, “the new mother shall be referred to an appropriate mental healthcare provider.”

“There is no evidence that any mental disorder is caused by chemical imbalance,” a Surgeon General’s report states. The much-touted idea of brain chemical imbalance is a total myth with no scientific research ever supporting it. All psychiatric “disorders” are voted into existence by the American Psychiatric Association and have no objective diagnostic tests, such as blood tests or hormone tests. The Mothers Act is the latest version of the old story of the Emperor’s New Clothes – get people to believe something exists when in fact it does not. Mothers who have trouble emotionally after giving birth do not have any mental illness. They may have temporary hormonal imbalance. They may need a stronger emotional support system to feel confident they can get help with the new baby. They may need financial assistance. But they are not mentally ill.

The Act also funds clinical research “for the development and evaluation of new treatments for postpartum conditions, including new biological agents.” That means synthetic drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has ensured more tax dollars will continue to flow into its coffers.

“The suicide rate is 718 for every 100,000 people taking SSRI/SNRI drugs in clinical trials,” Dr. Arif Khan told NIH in August 2002. SSRI/SNRI drugs are antidepressant drugs, which is an oxymoron because the drugs cause depression. They should be called pro-depression drugs. The suicide rate in the general population not taking psychiatric drugs is about 11 for every 100,000 people. In fact, all 33 brands of SSRI/SNRI drugs carry the FDA’s most severe warning, a Black Box Warning, for suicide. Besides suicide the drugs have more than 100 other severe side effects, including anxiety, panic attacks, irritability, hallucinations, hostility, aggressiveness, and mania. Antidepressants are mind-altering drugs that have never been shown in any clinical study to help depressed people much more than the herb St. John’s Wort or the placebo (sugar pill). In one study the placebo group had significantly better results than the group receiving the antidepressant drug, confirming that the body has natural ways to deal with the ups and downs of life.

Once people are labeled with a mental disorder, such as postpartum psychosis, their behavior is then blamed on the disorder when in fact the drugs are causing the behavior. For a real life example, check out Amy Philo’s story on You Tube. She was anxious because her newborn son had a severe allergic reaction to a formula given to her by a physician. Amy’s fear and anxiety for her child was absolutely normal and would have subsided once she had her baby safely at home. Instead, she was diagnosed as suffering from postpartum depression and given an antidepressant. She asked if the drug would be safe for her baby since she was breast-feeding. A physician told her yes, the drug would make her baby happy too. Research results do not support what the doctor told Amy. “In conclusion, our results suggest that maternal exposure to fluoxetine (Prozac, Luvox, Sarafem, and Symbyax) during pregnancy and lactation results in enduring behavioral alterations “throughout life.” All psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, are neurotoxins. That means they kill nerve cells everywhere in the body.

“After only being on the antidepressant for a couple of days I had thoughts of killing my baby.” Amy was horrified, but instead of blaming the drug’s known side effects, the physician blamed the label of postpartum depression. Obviously, Amy’s “mental illness” had worsened and she now needed to be put in a psychiatric ward. She didn’t agree to the incarceration but her resistance was again labeled as due to her mental illness. The white coats know best! Fortunately Amy’s story has a happy ending. She suspected the antidepressant was causing her strange thought patterns. She managed to be released from the psychiatric ward after only a brief stay and she stopped taking the drugs they had given her. All of Amy’s symptoms that had been labeled by the medical community as postpartum depression symptoms ceased when she stopped taking the drugs. Her baby and she were home together. A happy ending. That will not be the case when they initiate the Mothers Act. Since every mother is potential income to psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry, we can predict that the majority of new mothers will be labeled and drugged for postpartum depression. It is about money, not health.

The pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry are conjoined twins joined at the wallet. “Adoption of the Mothers Act is a positive development for women and their families,” says Alan F. Schatzberg, MD, President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Scharzberg was one of several influential psychiatrists who Senator Grassley’s investigations found had failed to disclose financial ties to pharmaceutical companies.

“In order to survive we psychiatrists must go where the money is,” Dr. Steven Sharfstein, APA Vice President told Congress. The money is in prescription psychiatric drugs as demonstrated by the astounding fact that in 2007 the five leading psychiatric drugs grossed more money than the gross national product of half the countries in the world.

The French philosopher Voltaire wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” The conjoined twins of the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry are doing their best to have the public believe the absurdity that the stress and emotional roller coaster of becoming a new mother is a mental illness. Then they get these vulnerable women to commit the atrocity of taking mind-altering, addictive antidepressant drugs that go directly into the baby through the mother’s milk. These drugs can make a new mother’s life a living hell. Ask Amy Philo.

Even if the mother does not suffer visible side effects from an antidepressant, she is still consuming an addictive drug that is a neurotoxin. And if she breast feeds, her baby is consuming a drug that has been shown to cause severe, irreparable damage.

Pregnant women taking antidepressants have babies who are 6 times more likely to have primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH) or a developing lung disorder. PPH is extremely serious. The drug causes developmental distortion of the lungs leading to lack of oxygen to crucial organs such as the brain, kidneys and liver. PPH is often fatal. Babies who initially survive PPH have long-term health problems including breathing difficulties, seizures and developmental disorders.

K.L. Carlson is a former drug rep turned whistleblower, author of the compelling expose, Diary of a Legal Drug Dealer – One Drug Rep. Dares to Tell You the Truth. She is also a CCHR International Commissioner (advisor)

Read the rest of this  article here:  http://www.opednews.com/articles/PHARMACEUTICAL-S-CONTROL-P-by-K-L-Carlson-100803-846.html

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Pharmaceutical Industry and Psychiatry—Conjoined Twins Joined at the Wallet, by former Pharma rep turned whistleblower

Friday, July 30th, 2010

OpEdNews
By K. L. Carlson
July 30, 2010

“Unlimited spending! Schedule all the programs you can.” That was the management directive announced at the regional business meeting I attended when I first became a pharmaceutical rep. When I heard the announcement I felt like I was on an Enron train that was roaring down the tracks, and the company expected everyone to be on board. The company was giving its sales force unlimited funds to hire physicians as paid speakers, sometimes to influence other physicians to prescribe the company’s drugs, at other times to simply financially reward physicians who wrote high volumes of prescriptions every month for the company’s drugs.

Former Merck regional sales manager, Gene Carbona, told the New York Times that the only thing the company considered when selecting physicians to provide presentations was “the volume or potential volume of prescribing that the doctor could do.” This is true of all pharmaceutical companies. According to The Wall Street Journal (August 31, 2009), Eli Lilly alone paid physicians $22 million dollars in just the first quarter of 2009.

The higher a physician is on the influential ladder, the greater the financial rewards to be reaped. Pharmaceutical companies pay influential leaders who can sway public opinion and influence research. And the area of medicine receiving the greatest amount of pharmaceutical money is psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the most drug industry financially supported medical association. In July 2008, Senator Charles Grassley’s demands that the APA provide an accounting of its finances revealed that in 2006 the pharmaceutical industry accounted for about 30 percent of the APA’s financing; more than $20 million dollars.

Read entire article here:  http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pharmaceutical-Industry-an-by-K-L-Carlson-100727-454.html

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Leading “brain imaging” center (Pharma funded) studying “biology of mental disorders” gets raided by Feds & shut down

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

(For more information on recently debunked  brain imaging studies on “schizophrenia” see link at bottom of this post)

The New York Times
By Benedict Carey
July 16, 2010

Columbia University has quietly suspended research at a nationally prominent brain-imaging center and reassigned its top managers after federal investigators found that it had routinely injected mental patients with drugs that contained potentially dangerous impurities.

The investigations found that the center — regarded by experts as the nation’s leader in the use of positron emission tomography, or PET, for psychiatric research — repeatedly violated Food and Drug Administration regulations over a four-year period.

“Failure to promptly correct these violations may result in legal action without further notice,” the agency wrote to Columbia in December 2008, citing lax internal quality control and sloppy procedures for formulating drug injections.

F.D.A. investigators returned in January 2010 and found that many of the center’s lab’s practices had not changed, and cited a long list of specific violations, including one instance in which the staff hid impurities from auditors by falsifying documents.

“They raided the place like it was a crime scene, seizing hard drives,” said one former lab worker, who requested anonymity because he feared reprisals from the university.

In a statement, the university said on Friday that it had conducted its own investigation of the lab at the request of the F.D.A. had and reported to the agency on July 6 that it found no evidence of harm to patients. The F.D.A. did not publicize its investigations; The New York Times learned of them from doctors who were familiar with the lab’s problems.

The office under fire, the Kreitchman PET Center, on West 168th Street in Manhattan, has attracted millions of dollars in research funds from the federal government and pharmaceutical companies to study drug actions and the biology of brain disorders, among other things.

Many of its studies focus on patients with disorders like schizophrenia and severe depression, who are especially vulnerable to poorly prepared imaging drugs because the compounds can act on brain receptors involved in their illness.

“We acknowledge serious shortcomings of quality control in the manufacturing process and record-keeping at this lab,” said David I. Hirsh, Columbia’s executive vice president for research. “That is why we are fundamentally reorganizing the lab’s management and operations in response to what the F.D.A. told us.”

To perform a PET scan, doctors must first inject patients with a radiotracer, a drug engineered to accumulate in the area of the body being studied and to emit low-level radiation detectable by a scanner.

The compounds are considered very safe. But because they degrade quickly, many laboratories produce them themselves, under protocols agreed upon with the F.D.A.

The agency regulates the allowable radiation levels and the purity of the drugs. If a drug contains too many impurities — unknown chemicals that may or may not be related to the tracer itself — then its effects in the body are unpredictable.

“There could be a patient safety issue, for one,” said Dr. Barry Siegel, chairman of the radioactive drug research committee at Washington University in St. Louis. “And there could be a scientific validity issue. If you’re exposing people to radiation and getting garbage data, then that becomes an ethical problem.”

Read entire article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/health/17columbia.html

For other recent expose’s on psychiatric brain imaging – see this article:

Anti-Psychotic Drugs are Likely to Cause Brain Damage, According to a New Study—

“The results challenge the widely-held view that schizophrenia itself causes brain structural changes, such as less brain grey matter, bigger ventricles and larger cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) spaces, claim researchers. The results are published in an edition earlier this year of the Psychological Medicine Journal.”

http://psychminded.co.uk/news/news2010/july10/Anti-psychotics-likely-to-cause-brain-damage001.html

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Public reports reveal psychiatric drugs linked to 64% of all suicides in Sweden

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Public reports reveal psychiatric drugs linked to 64% of all suicides in Sweden

The One Click Group
By Janne Larsson
June 29, 2010

This unique report presents data about the preceding psychiatric drug treatment for all persons who committed suicide in Sweden 2007. The conclusion is that a large percentage of the persons who committed suicide had received extensive treatment with psychiatric drugs within a year of and close to the suicide.
Public reports reveal psychiatric drugs linked to 64% of all suicides in Sweden.

This is a report about suicides committed in Sweden (with around 9 million citizens) in 2007 and the psychiatric drug treatment that preceded these suicides.

The report has three main parts:

• It gives unique data about all suicides committed in 2007 and the psychiatric drugs that the persons received within a year of the suicide.

• It compares these data with autopsy reports about psychiatric drugs found in the blood (of 98%) of all the persons who committed suicide in 2007.

• It gives extensive information about the psychiatric drug treatment given within a year to the subgroup of persons who committed suicide in 2007 and then were reported to the National Board of Health and Welfare by reason of law 3 – one third of all suicides committed that year.

The data presented on these pages should have been published by the responsible national authorities.

A large percentage of the persons who committed suicide in Sweden in 2007 had received extensive treatment with psychiatric drugs within a year of their suicide.

The idea that persons who are depressed are suffering from “chemical imbalances” and are deficient in the substance serotonin has been marketed by the pharmaceutical companies selling antidepressants (in the class of antidepressant drugs called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, SSRIs, such as Prozac, Paxil/Seroxat, Zoloft) for more than a decade. The intensive marketing has led persons to believe that their low mood is a deficiency disease – and that it is vital to supply the substance that corrects this deficiency – the antidepressant drug.

But there is no scientific evidence that a low mood is caused by a ”chemical imbalance” in the brain. The hypothesis has been rejected with the following words by one of the most well known names in the field, Dr. David Healy,“The serotonin theory of depression is comparable to the masturbatory theory of insanity.”

The Swedish medical agencies and their psychiatric consultants have used old data from forensic toxicological screenings to mislead the public and to heavily increase the use of antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs.

The most important information in this area is the patients’ medical history; the treatment history. Antidepressants, neuroleptics and other psychiatric drugs may cause harmful changes in the brain and these brain dysfunctions do not vanish when the drugs are discontinued – in many cases they cause chronic dysfunction to the brain, exemplified by the known neurological harm caused by neuroleptics. Many patients also get serious withdrawal reactions; reactions that can be so severe that they can lead to suicide.

Better sources of information are the unpublished clinical trials of psychiatric drugs done by pharmaceutical companies, and the important studies done by independent researchers. A number of these studies show that antidepressants and neuroleptics increase the risk of suicidal behaviour and directly cause effects that lead to suicide.

Download and read the full report here; http://www.theoneclickgroup.co.uk/documents/ME-CFS_docs/Psychiatric%20Drugs%20&%20Suicide,%20Sweden%202007.pdf

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The Total Failure of Modern Psychiatry

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Natural News
By David Gutierrez
June 27, 2010

Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine.

Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These “disorders” are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo.

“Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications,” he writes.

Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on “psychopathology” and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic “Bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course.

“With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs,” Shorter writes.

U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as “nerves,” “melancholia” or “manic-depressive illness.” These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed.

“Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms,” Shorter said. “A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has ‘social anxiety disorder’ or ‘seasonal affective disorder.’ … The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis — perceiving it as focusing excessively on “unconscious psychic conflicts” — and toward a more “scientific” model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of “major depression” and “bipolar disorder,” even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, “major depression” absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, “neurotic depression” and “melancholia.”

“This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases,” he writes.

DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: “To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline’s floundering writ large.”

For example, the new disorder of “psychosis risk syndrome” associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that “even if you aren’t floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic.” The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics.

Symptoms of “psychosis risk syndrome” include such vague descriptors as “disorganized speech.”

Other new “disorders” include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. “Minor neurocognitive disorder” describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while “temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria” refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper.

“DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases,” Shorter says, “turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity.”

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/029088_psychiatry_failure.htmll

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The Huffington Post— Creating Disease: Big Pharma and Disease Mongering

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

The Huffington Post
by Dr. Larry Dossey
June 18, 2010

You may think there is enough disease in the world already, and that no one would want to add to the diseases that we humans must deal with. But there is a powerful industry in our society that is working overtime to invent illnesses and to convince us we are suffering from them.

This effort is known as “disease mongering,” a term introduced by health-science writer Lynn Payer in her 1992 book Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick. Payer defined disease mongering as “trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill.” This strategy has also been called “the corporate construction of disease” by Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath and David Henry in the British Medical Journal. “There’s a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they’re sick,” they say. “Pharmaceutical companies are actively involved in sponsoring the definition of diseases and promoting them to both prescribers and consumers.”

Read entire article:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/big-pharma-health-care-cr_b_613311.html

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