By Richard Martin, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Sunday, July 18, 2010
From St Petersburg Times, St Petersburg, FL
If you are pregnant or know someone who is, then you need to read this article:
“Today, 4 percent of men and 10 percent of women in this country are taking antidepressants.”
[2008] Mental Health: It’s Life, Not Depression by Dr. Julian Whitaker (read the full article)
That means a percentage of all people driving cars on the road today are under the influence of one of these drugs. Does that make it any safer?
“Malicious” use of drugs an under-recognized form of child abuse
By Laura Stone, Postmedia News
“The “malicious” use of pharmaceuticals on children is an under-recognized form of child abuse, according to a study released on July 22.
New research that analyzes information from the U.S. National Poison Centre Data System from the past decade shows a small but steady number of children, median age two, who were found to have been exposed to at least one sedating agent, including street drugs, antipsychotics, cough medicines, and ethanol.
“It’s an aspect of child abuse that is not often considered,” said Dr. Shan Yin, a pediatrician at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and author of the study published in The Journal of Pediatrics.
“I think this is going on, probably throughout the country, and we’re not paying attention to it.”
The study looked at cases from 2000 to 2008, involving pharmaceutical exposure to children under seven years old, for which the reason was coded as “malicious” by poison centre standards.”
Read more: Malicious Use of Drugs
Do you believe everything you see in the ads on television or read in the newspaper? Check this out for some information about pharmaceutical drugs and the companies that provide them that you don’t hear:
I was reading the Rodale website for recipes and I happened upon their remedies section. They have some sensible depression remedies.
http://remedies.rodale.com/depression-remedies
I personally like the one, “Make Someone’s Day“. I try and make a friendly, uplifting comment to someone every day.
Perhaps you are lacking sleep (“Get some zzz’s“). Maybe you just need to make some space with their “Get Outside” suggestion. Perhaps you are B-vitamin deficient.
Try one different suggestion each day for 10 days and see how you feel.
Sir Ken Robinson talks about schools killing creativity in this Ted.com video:
http://blog.ted.com/2006/06/sir_ken_robinso.php
Below is an excerpt from his talk. You can listen to this particular section of the video at 15:00. I highly recommend the entire video if you have some time.
I’m doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she’s called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she’s wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point. It wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.
Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it — because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”
I said, “What happened?”
She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.” Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multimillionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatry’s billing bible of so-called mental disorders.
With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a mental illness simply by adding the term disorder onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific/medical validity to the disorders, the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening treatments based solely on opinion. The treatment of virtually ANY of the “illnesses” listed and so diagnosed is virtually ALWAYS one or more drugs.
There is NO science behind the “illnesses” listed, no test results, no verifiable or duplicable experimental data and NO evidence that such illnesses actually exist. They are voted into the manual by a show of hands at psychiatric conference. That is how much ”science” is involved. Take Road Rage as a recent example. People sometimes get mad while driving. Decide to call it a mental illness, get it voted into the DSM by a show of hands and Road Rage is now a mental illness.
“The nonscientific approach used to create DSM leads to irrational and constantly changing diagnostic criteria: a patient might be perfectly normal according to one version of DSM and mentally ill by the standards of the next. (For instance, ‘narcissistic personality disorder’—used to describe vain people who are self-centered and frequently take advantage of others—was a DSM ‘diagnosis’ until 1968. It was eliminated from the version used between 1968 and 1980, when it was reinstated. Thus, a self-centered, vain person was ‘mentally ill’ before 1968, normal for the next twelve years, and then ‘mentally ill’ again after 1980.)” - Dr. Sydney Walker, III, psychiatrist, neurologist
“In the same year, the Washington Post published the fact that Ritalin which is prescribed to very young children had never been tested on that age group (under 6′s) and yet, between 150,000 – 200,000 children between the ages of 2 and 4 were prescribed Ritalin.”
~ Hilary Butler letter to British Medical Journal 2004
Fact: Ritalin is a Schedule II Substance, which means Ritalin has a “high potential for abuse” that “may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence,” and the federal government sets limits on the amount of these amphetamine drugs that may be manufactured each year.
There isn’t enough blog post room here to list ALL of the side effects of Ritalin. Visit http://ritalinsideeffects.net/ to see the full list.
This is from EdMedExpert Blog:
http://www.emedexpert.com/blog/general/17-interesting-facts-about-doctors-and-patients/
Go to the link to read the explanation. My comments are below each point in square brackets.
1. How frequently do doctors misdiagnose patients?
[I thought their 10-15% was a little low. See the book 'A Dose of Sanity' by Sydney Walker III M.D. for commonly misdiagnosed conditions.]
2. Who prescribes antibiotics inappropriately? Foreign, extra-busy and older MDs.
3. Doctors’ choice of prescriptions are often influenced by their patients.
[In Canada, where it's illegal to have those spacy drug ads in magazines or on TV, I see those American ads on US television programming. I can imagine a patient coming into their doctor's office and having some symptom. Goodness, their medical education comes from thumbing through an issue of Oprah Magazine, bursting with drug ads. "Doctor, I think I should be prescribed Griefexa." What's next? Learning brain surgery on Youtube? |All that 'training' is obviously going to lead to more misdiagnosed conditions.]
4. Free drug samples influence prescribing.
5. Patients treated with respect are more likely to follow medical advice.
6. Doctor-Patient communication has a real impact on health.
7. Most patients want to shake hands with their physicians.
8. Seven things patients expect from doctors.
[Oddly enough, being able to diagnose what is wrong with them isn't on this list.]
9. Surgeons are taller and better looking than other doctors.
10. Patients often receive incomplete drug instructions.
[And often not knowing the side effects and how they interact with other drugs]
11. Disclosure of medical errors: there is a gap between physicians’ attitudes and their real-world experiences admitting such errors.
12. The highest rate of “Off-label” prescriptions accounts for Antidepressants, Anticonvulsants, and Antipsychotic medications.
13. Seven medical myths even doctors believe.
14. Majority of U.S. doctors believe religion is beneficial for patients’ health.
15. Psychiatrists are the least religious of all doctors.
16. However, psychiatrists are most interested in patients’ religion.
17. The fine art of patient-doctor relationships.
I once knew a woman named Jill,
whose psychiatrist gave her a pill.
But it messed up her head,
and just made her dead.
Now she can’t pay her doctor’s big bill.
