Meet the Doctor Big Pharma Can't Shut Up

[Skyler]

This is a long article, so use the link for the full scoop. And there is a comment section on the Alternet site... About Doc. Healy. Right on!

 

 

Meet the Doctor Big Pharma Can't Shut Up

 

May 30, 2013 AlterNet By Tamara Straus

 

The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs. One psychiatrist is fighting back.

 

For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.

 

Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect—both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being “eclipsed” by drug companies.

 

“It’s been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs,” said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.

 

Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.

 

Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of “biological psychiatry,” and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.

 

For years, it was fairly easy for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industries to label Healy, Kirsch and Breggin as alarmists. But two summers ago, one of the most prominent members of U.S. medical establishment, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine, published an article damning the over-prescription of psychoactive drugs. In two essays in the June 23, 2011 and July 14, 2011 New York Review of Books, Angell backed arguments by the university clinician Kirsh, the mental heath journalist Robert Whitaker, and Boston psychiatrist Daniel Carlat that there is something extremely suspicious about the following trends: the number of people treated for depression has tripled since the launch of Prozac in 1987; 10 percent of Americans over age six are taking antidepressants; and 30 antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel are replacing cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the U.S., largely because they are being prescribed to children.

 

Angell’s articles should have been a bomb on the medical establishment. She wrote:

 

“The industry-sponsored studies usually cited to support psychoactive drugs—and they are the ones that are selectively published—tend to be short-term, designed to favor the drug, and show benefits so small that they are unlikely to outweigh the long-term harms. … Both the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatry profession have strong financial interests in convincing the public that drug treatment is safe and the most effective treatment for mental illnesses, and they also have an interest in expanding the definitions of mental illness.”

 

 

But like Healy, Angell’s warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Recent data indicates that U.S. prescription drug use is growing. The September 2012 Consumer Reports National Research Center report found that among the 46 percent of American adults taking prescription drugs, a fourth of those ages 18 to 39 regularly take two prescription drugs, indicating that multiple drug use is no longer confined to older Americans. Congressional testimony in 2012 by the American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians revealed that Americans consume 80 percent of opiate painkillers produced in the world. And a January 2011 report from Stanford University Medical School warned that antispychotics are now regularly being prescribed to treat conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia. Read more here

[Finn]

I saw this on AlterNet earlier today. Maybe if enough outlets keep repeating stuff like this, it will eventually slip into the collective consciousness. Or prescriptions for all kinds of medicines will just get more easy to get because that's how people are: Quick fix! I'm not sure if people actually care that these drugs don't work. Many people probably know but keep taking them anyway because insight into one's position does not cause a revolution. Instead, we shrug reality off and move on.

[Skyler]

I saw this on AlterNet earlier today. Maybe if enough outlets keep repeating stuff like this, it will eventually slip into the collective consciousness. Or prescriptions for all kinds of medicines will just get more easy to get because that's how people are: Quick fix! I'm not sure if people actually care that these drugs don't work. Many people probably know but keep taking them anyway because insight into one's position does not cause a revolution. Instead, we shrug reality off and move on.

 

I sometimes put this sort of article in because many new folks are not familiar with the full expent of Big Pharma's shenannegans.  And this is a farily good synopsis, IMO. 

 

Many are innundated with the mega corps hooliganism so knowing no longer translates into action, rather more quiescent capitulation.

 

Skyler

[Altostrata]

bump