Posts tagged - pharmaceuticals

Hey, Addiction is a Brain Disease and “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

Posted on: November 20, 2017, in: , , , , ,

drugs pixabayAccording to a statement on the Betty Ford Foundation website, and many other sources, addiction is a brain disease, not a character flaw. This “brain disease model” may be promoted by well-meaning people who have addicted loved ones, but it’s not accurate, just a PR concept, with no scientific evidence whatsoever. But search “addiction is a brain disease” and the Internet is full of people who bought into the lie, claiming that’s the way it is. Opioid addiction, sex addiction, food addiction, Internet addiction, porn addiction, it’s the new fashion statement to be addicted to one or more things that are just too big and strong for little old you to overcome, you poor thing.

Psychiatrists dreamed up this idea to make money and to get more people under their control. First they cozied up to traditional medicine to seem more official, and while psychiatrists have medical degrees, that’s just cover for voodoo head-bump crystal-vibration nonsense that is modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

They like to use diabetes, as an example of why drug abusers are so helpless. “It’s something that happens to your body, you can’t do anything about it, it’s not a moral failing, and it requires a drug for the rest of your life.” A drug which — just like all those street drugs out there — were produced by BigPharma.

So if you are drug addicted, it’s not your fault, you can’t help it, it’s your body’s fault, probably something you got from your parents via their DNA. And did I say “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

Along with this brain disease model is the hint of a protected class of citizens who are not responsible for their condition. Drug addicts – I can see it coming – are not responsible for their condition and need care at public expense for the rest of their life, because, after all, it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT.

Well, I beg to differ. Anytime something you do – like knocking over liquor stores to feed your heroin habit, or injecting opioids or cooking meth in your spare room and screaming at people who aren’t there — you are killing yourself, endangering people around you and filling your neighborhood with crazy, amped up psychos who break into houses and shoot people who they think are going to kill them. THAT IS YOUR FAULT YOU JERK!

It’s not your body, it’s the choices and you’ve made them. The choices that led you down back alleys where needles litter the street,  and now you – and all the “brain disease model apologists for drugs and drug abusers” are determined to “reduce the stigma” and engage in “harm reduction” where you don’t get arrested for creating all this chaos, but instead you are swaddled into the caring arms of psychiatrists who will put you on methadone maintenance at public expense, or some of the new psychedelic drugs which means all those people who actually work at real jobs, creating useful products and services for society will pay for your treatment for the rest of your useless and non-productive life.

You can’t change your body, but you can change your mind. If you listen to the psychs they don’t give you a ghost of a chance to dig yourself out and you’ll just keep using street drugs, psych drugs, all kinds of deadly crap, until you overdose and die, and the psychs will shake their heads sadly and say they need more money to treat poor sorry-ass drug addicts like you who need sympathy and drugs to live.  Oh, and let’s get rid of the “stigma” of addiction, because after all it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!

One thing about sympathy? It’s deadly. It’s an agreement from others that you are a sad little nobody. It will suck the life out of you, kill your own ability to push through obstacles. It makes a basically good spiritual being think they get love and help only when they are pathetic.

The psychs won’t tell you this, but you are a basically good spiritual being, who’s been through hell and back. You are tough, you’re still here and you can change your life. It’s not destiny that determines your future, it’s the choices you make. So stop whining and get busy cleaning up. It’s not easy, the drugs make you a slave and you have to do courageous things to break those chains and escape.

And forget about suicide, death doesn’t help. You come back the same spirit you were, with the same temptations, same vices, the same choices in front of you. Different body, different DNA, and it’s not the body that will make or break you. It’s not a chemical imbalance or some phony brain disease, it’s those stupid choices you make.

So stop blaming your body, your parents, the horrible and evil and terrible society that drives you to drink or use meth or some other crap you snort, eat, inject, smoke or cram up your ass. If you want to be a slave there are lots of others out there who will be happy to make you one. You can commiserate, share needles, give each other AIDS and hepatitis and die in some piss-stinking alley feeling really sorry for yourself. Or you can get well you sorry-ass addict and start helping other people — that’s the way out.

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Hillary Clinton: Teach Reading, Writing and Mental Health

Posted on: November 14, 2017, in: , , , , , , , ,

Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton wants a nationwide curriculum to teach depression and anxiety in high schools, according to Modern Healthcare. New York is already plowing ahead on mental health, as last year Gov. Cuomo already mandated the inclusion of  mental health issues in the curriculum.

But hold on a minute. Already, 3.4 million New York State residents are functionally illiterate  – many the product of dysfunctional public schools. But many schools now provide food, counseling, contraception, “life skills” like cooperation, self-control, motivation, and other so-called “soft skills.” And next year they begin training on mental health. Perhaps if public schools taught reading, writing and arithmetic really well, students would become literate and productive adults, and wouldn’t need to be medicated with psych drugs.

Because, you see, all this talk about mental health for children is nothing more than a marketing scheme to get them on  psychiatric pharmaceuticals, so those BigPharma CEOs can get even richer.

In 2013, around 8 million school kids were on psychiatric drugs  but there are still lots of kids out there who are “underserved” as they say, and Teenscreen for example, was funded by BigPharma and designed to get kids on stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall and  into the psychiatric pill-mill.

Education is already a mile wide and an inch deep, a swamp of social programming and political correctness. There are good teachers out there, but the social agenda is against them. Homeschooling, charter schools, check them out and whatever you do, keep your kids away from the psychs!

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Army Will Now Accept Mental Cases, Train Them to Kill

Posted on: November 14, 2017, in: , , , ,

sniperThe Army is expanding the system of waivers whereby people with mental disorders can join the military. Waivers were cancelled in 2009 when too many soldiers committed suicide, but hey, now they are a bit short of recruits and thus relaxing the standards. According to USA Today, people with a history of drug use, poor aptitude test scores, self mutilation and bipolar disorders aren’t necessarily barred from military service.

Now though, the military has better medical records, and we all know that psychiatrists and psych meds have everything under control. Just ask military psychiatrist Nidal Hasan who shot up Fort Hood and murdered 13 people and injured 30 others. And there’s pretty good evidence of a connection between psych meds and mass shootings.

Half a million vets already have PTSD according to one source and PTSD is exacerbated by stress, trauma and sexual assault. So if you wanted to create a huge spike in military PTSD, murders, sexual assaults and general chaos, you might induct a bunch of men, women, gays, and transexuals with mental disorders and drug abuse histories into the military, give them weapons, train them to kill, then send them off to some combat zone. If this sounds nuts to you, go take a happy pill and in the upside down world of mental health, you will soon be right as rain.

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Take the Poison and the Antidote and Call Me in the Morning

Posted on: November 14, 2017, in: , , , , ,

death pixabayBigPharma is busily creating poisons and antidotes, and making big bucks on both. The latest is Ingrezza, an antidote for tardive dyskinesia, caused by antipsychotic medications. Tardive dyskinesia causes uncontrollable motions of face and body such as sticking out the tongue, waving the arms, moving the lips and so on. Often it’s permanent. One of the problems with Ingrezza is “somnolence” so it can put you to sleep and you might snore, but hopefully your arms will stop waving and your mouth will stop moving. With lots of research, BigPharma will soon have some kind of speed-type stuff to handle that sleepy side-effect stuff. And a 30-count bottle of 40mg Ingrezza tablets will cost you – or the taxpayers if you have some kind of universal health coverage – about $5,275.

Other examples of the poison/antidote paradigm are all the street drugs – which were all invented by BigPharma – and now with medication assisted treatment, addicts get off the illegal street drug poisons and get onto the prescription medication antidotes like methadone, which are really actually poisons themselves, but at least they are billable under Medicaid and insurance and BigPharma can profit from them unlike the street drugs they invented but can no longer monetize.

But as the rehab people can tell you, methadone is an opioid which is actually harder to kick than heroin, as it takes longer to metabolize. Luckily, the psychiatrists have already decreed that addiction is a chronic disease, just exactly like diabetes, for example, and so lifelong medication assisted treatment is prescribed. So there’s little danger of addicts, or patients as they are now called, getting off the stuff for good, unless they die, and BigPharma has a drug to prevent that.

Somewhere  along the way, when the poisons/antidotes/poisons get too much for the body, BigPharma has a real antidote called Naloxone or Narcan that shuts off the effects of opioids temporarily and allows the addict/patient to begin breathing again. It doesn’t stop the addiction – which, as you will recall, is officially a lifelong disease – so poison antidote Narcan, poison, antidote, Narcan will likely continue until death of the addict/patient.

IMHO, BigPharma should be required to do amends on all the poisonous crap they have poured into the public bloodstream, by funding drug rehab centers around the country that have as a product a person stably off all drugs. In addition, Congress could implement this 12-step program to get America off drugs. Maybe then we could get back to a real life where drugs are only for real diseases.

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The Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Railroad

Posted on: November 01, 2017, in: , , , , , , ,

robot pixabayYou take 200 depressed people, implant wires into their brains. Half of the implants you charge with electricity, half you don’t, to get a good control group. Results? A flop, but some people want to keep the implants after the test. Why? Well, as studies have established, depressed people feel better when people ask them how they feel, with a live person running their fingers through those wires in the head. Ethics aside, the big question is – who will pay for these implants, the follow ups, the flashlight batteries, and after the subject’s demise the autopsy, brain slicing and microscopy?

The patients won’t be paying, because as psychiatry transitions from pharmaceuticals that don’t work to implants that won’t work (electroceuticals they are called) bigpharma needs trillion-dollar revenues to overcome generic drug competition, expiring patents, the gradually rising specter of drug side effects such as mass murder, and basically, the fact that popular drugs like antidepressants don’t work, or work only because of “the placebo effect.” And to fund this transition we’re talking big money, that can only come from Medicare, the Veterans Administration, insurance companies or best of all, a single-payer health care system that operates on “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

This is the beginning, IMHO, of a drive to get deep brain implants, and their cousins, “transcranial magnetic stimulation” paid for not as freaky science experiments but as legitimate treatments for mental and physical disorders. And that means some big bucks, in the “Trillion-with-a-T” range. In exchange, perhaps we can one day plug into our computers and learn to play the piano or dance the tethered tango.

In the meantime, to get us accustomed to the idea, we’re already implanting RFID dog-tracking chips in people for their own good and to give them immediate access to buy stuff from the snack machine, login to computers and use pay toilets. It’s like those spy movies where the guy — to get off the grid — must dig a tracking chip out of his arm with a steak knife.

First to get the implants will be guys with big federal government pockets. Veterans with VA benefits and PTSD, most likely, on lifetime subscription plans paid for by adding to our Chinese debt. Anyway, we’re being railroaded down the track of bad ideas fueled by good sci-fi movies. And – I have to do this – as the Borg always said, “resistance is futile.“

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The Opioid Crisis: A BigPharma Marketing Scheme?

Posted on: October 26, 2017, in: , , , , , ,

There’s lots of attention now on treating opioid addicts. In the news this week, FDA Commissioner  Scott Gottlieb said that the government would focus on Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) to help all the addicts hooked on opioids. But not everybody likes that idea.

“If we’re just substituting one opioid for another,” said Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, in the same news article. “We’re not moving the dial much.” Price may have been referring to the idea – pushed by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical firms  – that addiction is a lifelong mental disease, and needs lifelong “treatment” with other opioids manufactured and sold by BigPharma. One hooked person is a lifelong customer, regardless of whether the addiction began on the street or in a doctor’s office.

Big pharma created heroin (Bayer) and LSD (Sandoz). Merck pioneered the commercial manufacture of morphine, distributed cocaine and invented MDMA. OxyContin which started the latest “opioid crisis” was created by German scientists and pushed into society by Purdue Pharma. Crystal meth was first created in Japan and after World War II Abbott Laboratories won FDA approval for meth as a remedy for alcoholism and weight gain. Fentanyl, responsible for the majority of opioid overdose deaths, was invented by Janssen Pharmaceutica.

Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT)  takes people addicted to heroin, for example, and switches them to legal pharmaceutical products such as methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. So much for the poison.

BigPharma also markets the antidote. A drug to use in cases of opioid overdose, called Naloxone  (Also called Narcan and Evzio).  Thousands of first responders, doctors, and family members of addicts or those on opioid pain relievers now carry this opioid antidote. The cost of a dose just jumped from $575  to about $4,500 according to Wired Magazine, and has a shelf life of 18-24 months.

So poison plus antidote, it’s all good if you’re BigPharma. Create all the nasty drugs to hook people, get your reps to push prescription opioids, hook thousands, create a crisis, and divert the addicts to Medication Assisted Treatment on other opioids you can bill insurance for. The ones that overdose, give them a $4500 shot of Naloxone and keep them alive and using.

And since drug addiction is a mental disease, the psychs get in on the fun as well, prescribing shrink meds that have lots of side effects like mass shootings, after which psychs can offer counseling in the form of more prescriptions. And now that marijuana legalization is spreading, the psychs have conveniently discovered that smoking weed creates psychosis, which needs treatment, pharmaceuticals, etc. And down the rabbit hole we go.

 

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An Open Letter to Dr. Joshua Gordon, Director NIMH

Posted on: October 25, 2017, in: , , , ,

Dr. Joshua Gordon
Director, National Institute of Mental Health
25 Oct. 2017

Dear Dr. Gordon,

I was encouraged by something you said in an interview with the Washington Post recently:

“All these off-label uses of any of our psychiatric medications result from desperation on the part of both patients and physicians who don’t know what else to do for their patients . . . The evidence for any of them is nonexistent or minimal. But we don’t have good alternatives. We don’t have evidence-based treatments that really do the job. So that means that people turn to whatever can help them in a symptomatic way . . . It’s a problem that’s borne out of the fact that our treatments just don’t work, or don’t work well, for a substantial fraction of our patients.”

Many people have decried the use of antidepressants, for example, as studies show them being only slightly more efficacious than placebos, increasing the incidence of “suicidality,” significantly increasing the risk of death, and when taken by pregnant women, increasing the incidence of mental illness in their children. And while most of these studies were fairly recent, pharmaceutical companies have for some time not been reporting negative effects of their products.

Research does show that simple measures such as cutting sugar from the diet, and engaging in exercise do help reduce depression, have few side effects and cost patients or the treasury little to nothing.

I hope you will have the interest and ability help transition the psychiatric profession back to talk therapy, and off the money train of harmful, ineffective and expensive pharmaceuticals. Your own agency found that simple postcards and phone calls reduced the risk of suicide in patients as effectively as other more harmful treatments.

Also it seems that as pharmaceuticals become less popular, psychiatry is reverting to “electroceuticals” psychedelics and electroconvulsive therapy. I say reverting, because in the 1960s the MKULTRA project investigated these same methods as mind control techniques. Electroceuticals, for example, as developed by Dr. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado for MKULTRA were then called “Stimoceivers” and “Chemitrodes.” Please look elsewhere for remedies.

Thanks, and good luck on your new post.

Best,

Wayne Edward Hanson
wehanson@aol.com

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What’s Wrong with Mixing Electricity and Brains?

Posted on: October 21, 2017, in: , , , , , ,

Danger pixabayMost people are familiar with movies about drugs, hypnosis, electroshock and so forth that are used to manipulate and control human beings. But they’re science fiction, right? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Terminal Man, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Manchurian Candidate all feture stories about mental manipulation and control.

A little closer to reality One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest showed how electroconvulsive therapy can be used to control and suppress human beings. It was filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, and created a wave of revulsion against electroshock that continues today, and is one obstacle  that electroshock advocates must hurdle.

You may be surprised to discover that there are electroshock advocates who are still zapping brains. Most people think the practice died out in the early 1960s, back when author Ernest Hemingway had 15 electroshock treatments, went home, put a shotgun in his mouth and blew the top of his head off.

But psychiatrists are still putting electrodes on the sides of people’s heads and shooting current through their brains. About 100,000 people per year endure the process. Those advocates  make it seem nicer these days, they put the patient to sleep first, and inject them with muscle relaxant so that they don’t break so many teeth and bones from spasms and contractions. Some even load up the body with insulin to make it go into convulsions. It has the advantage of reducing the electric bill, just an overdose of insulin and presto, you have a dazed and confused person who doesn’t seem so crazy.

Electricity even when used with good intentions often  ends up in the heavy hands of control. We’ve used jolts of electricity as punishment in many ways. Electric cattle fences, cattle prods, tasers, electric shock collars for dogs, etc. Ivar Lovaas, a UCLA professor who died in 2010 began putting autistic kids barefooted on electrical wires. He’d turn on the current until they did something non-autistic, then he’d turn off the current. On off, on off,like a light switch  over and over to condition the dog – or children rather – to act less autistic. Slaps, yelling, etc. were also used but electricity was the centerpiece.

And now, with the advance of technology, we’ve got subtle and not so subtle ways of using electricity to control others. Surveillance technology from closed circuit cameras to electronic ankle bracelets, GPS monitoring of cell phone locations, etc. But perhaps the most intrusive new technology is putting wires in people’s brains in something the  psychs call deep brain stimulation. This electrical stimulation of the brain – like electroshock – has its own 1950s bad example.

In the early 1950, it was a secret government project called MKULTRA – don’t worry, this is not “tinfoil on head”  stuff – here’s a document from the Supreme Court describing the program: “Between 1953 and 1966,” said the Supreme Court, “the Central Intelligence Agency financed a wide-ranging project, code-named MKULTRA, concerned with ‘the research and development of chemical, biological, and radiological materials capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior.’” One project in MKULTRA was controlling the human mind with chemical and electrical brain implants. It was spurred by the Cold War and the idea was to figure out how to control the enemy’s minds and save money on bullets.

Since the project was bound to create outrage if discovered, it was kept secret for a while and when it was exposed, the CIA Director destroyed most of the records. But enough data leaked out that it was pretty big news.

Since secret government projects often appear on Wikileaks,  this time around — in my opinion — a project similar to MKULTRA  is being conducted in the open, albeit under cover of how electricity, wired into the brain, can  cure brain diseases, epilepsy, speed up learning and so forth. It’s funded by the Department of Defense. Sound familiar? The keyword is “electroceuticals,” a combination of “electricity” and “pharmaceuticals.” And DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding it.

Another idea is to control minds with wireless electricity, so much less messy. There could be little emitters all up and down the streets making everyone very passive, or happy or normal. But that sounds like science fiction again.

So when you hear about these marvelous new techniques in which electricity makes athletes stronger, makse students smarter, makes epilepsy disappear, stops compulsions and obsessions, and cures all sorts of intractable diseases — just stop a minute and remember that this stuff can be — and probably will be — used for some new and exotic flavor of mind control.

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Those of Asian Heritage Not Falling for Psychiatric Medicalization

Posted on: October 12, 2017, in: , , ,

Asians have traditionally resisted the lure of psychiatrists and their drugs, and so the psychs have intensified their efforts to turn Asians into consumers of mental health services. While nearly 20% of Americans seek mental health treatments, less than 10% of those of Asian heritage do so. The psychs – with their strategy of medicalization of many normal behaviors – are trying to establish that those of Asian heritage are as mentally ill as the rest of Americans who have been convinced through direct-to-consumer ads that they have “restless leg syndrome,” “caffeine-induced sleep disorder,” “compulsive shopping disorder,” or “disruptive behavior disorder not otherwise specified” that need treatment with psychoactive drugs.

This “disagnostic inflation” according to one psychiatrist   appears as medicalization, DSM imperialism and other descriptive terms whereby ordinary or quirky behaviors well within the bounds of acceptance in society are redefined as psychiatric disorders for which some expensive dangerous psychoactive drug is just the ticket.

As an example of “diagnostic creep” Autism was once a rare but severe disorder  which just grew and grew, including less severe behaviors, such as children who don’t play well with others and so forth. Then in 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 5 – used to bill insurance for disorders voted into existence by psychiatrists – pulled all the lesser behaviors into a gigantic category called “Autism Spectrum Disorder.”

But according to Swedish and Danish studies of more than a million children, there was no real increase in autism even while those diagnosed with autism increased significantly. “Two-thirds of the increase in autism diagnoses in Denmark were due to the way the disorder is diagnosed and monitored,” said a report .

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Drugs Approved Faster, Expect More Safety Issues

Posted on: October 08, 2017, in: , , ,

Since FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has taken over, drug approvals have accelerated according to Bloomberg News, with 34 news drugs approved so far — double last year’s rate. Gottlieb, appointed by President Trump, has a long history of working for and with the pharmaceutical industry so the pro-industry fast tracking was to be expected. Trump has also pledged to “slash restraints” on new drug development.

Now the only conundrum for investors is whether stocks will rise because of so many new drugs coming on the market, or fall because of increased competition that could lower prices.

Regardless, the net result will be more drugs flooding into the country with less scrutiny, and less testing. Nearly one-third of FDA-approved drugs already had to be revisited after safety-related “incidents.” Psych drugs and those on accelerated approval fared even worse. In addition, 90% of new drugs coming onto the market are no more effective than the old drugs they are to replace. But the race to get a piece of the $1 trillion (with a “t) per year pharmaceutical pie is irresistible.

 

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