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Psychiatric Drugs |
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John Nash and neuroleptic drugs are making us crazy
Friends:
at http://healthfully.org/dta/id7.html --- 5/30/15 John
Nash the mathematician died on the 23rd of May of 2015. I read his biography, A Beautiful Mind, which
was made into a film of the same name in 2001.
Of particular interest to me in the Wikipedia
article: in it John Nash
describes how the psychiatric
drugs made him worse, and that is why he did all he could to avoid their usage
(this is the norm, and explain the low patient compliance). The book and film spin a different account of
his being medicated, which John attributes to the author’s mother who is a
psychiatrist who promotes psychiatric drugs.
The evidence in support of their usage is lacking, but pharma is very
good at marketing, and the FDA standards are too low. John Nash reaffirms what is well supported in
the medical literature, namely that in a sample of a 100 or more patients
psychiatric drugs, that after one year those on the drugs are worse off than
those who just get talk or behavioral therapy.[1]
In 1981 I did a term paper in which I reviewed the literature, and that
was the conclusion of the evidence back then.
Today it has gotten worse because back then pharma merely funded
clinical trials and allowed the university professors to run them.
Today pharma is involved in all aspects of
the clinical trial; as they put it “to protect their investment”. An examination of the details reveals the
depth of the tobacco science. The
standard by which the FDA approves neuroleptic drugs (one that effect neurons) is
comparable to fishing in a barrel full of carp. 20% of the Hamilton
Rating Scale for depression (HRSD) is based on sleeping better.
It is the questionnaire upon which proof of
efficacy is “proven” for the FDA[2].
These drugs with one exception (Wellbutrin) are major tranquilizers. They all
cause drowsiness, thus based on the Hamilton Rating Scale they are approved by the FDA. Moreover, the
clinical trials are not blinded because over 80% of the patients know if they
are given a drug that makes them drowsy versus a placebo; and the same for the
physicians who monitor the trial—this is called breaking blind.
The trials ran for submission to the FDA last just 6 weeks (with some exceptions), and
on a very select group of health patients (usual only about 1 in 7 applicants are
selected). And it gets worse, typically
there is a wash-out-period where the patients are given the drug, and then depending
on results they are included in the trial are dropped out; after which the
trial is started. Finally, pharma
owns
the results, which they refuse to supply to the medical journals.
Thus the journals cannot know the actual
results or the methods. The journal
only
gets the finished article. In over
70%
of clinical trials, the data is given to companies hired by pharma which ghost write the articles (yes articles,
because pharma publishes the results in an average of 8 journals).
Neither pharma nor the ghost writing company
sign off on the article, rather it is given to a KOL who puts his name on the
article as lead researcher, along with others who worked on the trial.
KOLs are Key Opinion Leaders who in medicine
rise to prominence through the support from pharma. A study where a group of professors obtained
the raw data on psychiatric drugs clinical trials submitted to the FDA upon
application for a patent. The raw
data was
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They found comparing the data
to the 74 published journal
article derv ied from those phase -3 trials that there was an average of 32%
positive bias in the journal articles pharma KOLs signed off on.
If
this all seems like I am cherry picking the worse of pharma, read Prof. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Pharma (I will gladly give you
an audio copy of that book), or watch Harvard Prof. Marcia Angell
President’s Lecture at University of Montana on bad pharma. And if you doubt the harm that psychiatric
drugs do, then go to my video
library and watch the documentaries
on YouTube—or if you
desire I can give you a DVD in MP4 format. One
last warning psychiatric drugs (tranquilizers dressed as Asclepius) have been approved
for treating pain, back
medication, premenstrual syndrome, hypertension, smoking, epileptic seizures, and
a dozen other uses. If just a few patients on Flexeril (cyclobenzaprine)[3]
in a phase 3 clinical trial for back pain, the participants in sleep more, than
then there will be less pain in the drugged group compared to the sugar pill
group. This is sufficient for FDA
approval. Moreover the
majority of blockbuster are over
70% of the time administered off-label (not for FDA approved uses).
In it was exposed in a court case over
Pfizer’s promoting off-label usage for Neurontin, an SSRI, that it was prescribed
94% of the time for off-label uses. Neurontin
is one of the top five best-selling psychiatric drugs--total sales.
What
was uncovered in the court case over Neurontin is in pharma’s standard business
procedure. If drowsiness is a side
effect
it is a tranquilizer (downer), unless it is an opiate or an antihistamine.
When
I was young, I observed people lower their quality of their life by doing
recreational drugs, mostly alcohol. Two
of my uncles were alcoholics. Other
legal popular recreational drugs: in
the
50s barbiturates, followed in the 60s amphetamines and the diazepam (Valium) family
of drugs, in the 90s it was and still is the SSRIs. It amounts to just another of way relieving
boredom by handicapping the brain. Today
I watch pharma create a market (like tobacco in the 1920s) for their mood
altering downers. I know two who
have
committed suicide, a major side effect of psychiatric drugs.
My mother had her health ruined and spent the
last two years on her back with a broken hip because she was given a bisphosphonate
for osteoporosis, rather than the older, safe-and-very-effective off-patent
estradiol. Terry diagnosed with
terminal
lung cancer had the quality of life last 9 months made much worse by the side
effects from pointless chemotherapy. The
average month or 2 of life extension wasn’t worth it. Everyone I know over the age of 60 is taking
(with 3 exceptions) is taking drugs that aren’t worth their side effects. The
more I dig, the more dirt I find on pharma.
In the an email I got from the British Medical Journal, the publication of
the British Medical Association, they have published an analysis by Prof. Peter
Gotzsche in which he calculated that there were 539,000 extra deaths yearly
from the taking of psychiatric drugs in the US and European Union.
See attachment for his article.
Please
take the time to know what time it is, to know of tobacco ethics used by
corporations including big pharma. As
Prof. Ben Goldacre puts it, “A perverse system produces perverse results.” Let the rational side of your brain trump the
emotion side which bonds with pharma and your doctor. Go to the documentary page and become informed. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ [1] Doctors with selective
memory cherry-pick the
best cases. The logic conclusion
is that
the best cases would have done even better without the medication.
It is like assuming that because John lived
to 90 years though he smoked, the smoking didn’t harm him. Rather the logical
view is that he would have lived healthier and longer if he didn’t smoke. The same logic applies to pharma’s
neuroleptic drugs—drugs which alter the natural function of neurons.
It gets worse, the drugs are marketed as
treating abnormal levels of a neurotransmitter, however the science behind this
claim is lacking—though or course pharma has done tobacco science to support
their claim. I recommend reading
The Emperor’s New Drugs, Prof.
Irving
Kirsch. [2] “The Hamilton is a 51 point scale…. For example,
one can get a six-point reduction in Hamilton scores ;merely by sleeping
better, even if there is no other change in the person’s depressive symptoms”
Prof. Irving Kirsch, The
Emperor’s New Drugs, 2010. [3] Cyclobenzaprine is
closely related to the tricyclic antidepressants, at. The very name bezaprine indicates that
it is
in the same class as valium, a benzodiazepine type. Drowsiness is one of its side effects. |
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http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g4218/rr/759524
BMJ 2014; 348 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g4218 (Published 30 June 2014)Cite this as: BMJ 2014;348:g4218 Margaret McCartney
questions whether there is overprescribing of antidepressants and doubts that
the information provided by the Council for Evidence Based Psychiatry that
antidepressant use had increased by 92% in England since 2003 is correct (1). I
can assure McCartney that the use of antidepressants has increased
dramatically. An OECD report found an increase
in defined daily doses of 88% between 2000 and 2011 in the United Kingdom,
similar to the average of 89% in 19 OECD countries (2). In Denmark, sales
of SSRIs are so high that every one of us can be in treatment for 6 years of
our lives. Marketing and widespread corruption have played a major role for
this disaster (3). The increase in sales of SSRIs was closely correlated to the
number of products on the market (r = 0.97), and 100% of the DSM-IV panel
members who defined what ‘mood disorders’ are had financial ties to the drug
makers (4). It
is very likely that antidepressants cause more harm than good (5). There are
many problems with the trials (3), one of which being that they have not been
effectively blinded. Many years ago,
adequately blinded trials of tricyclic antidepressants were done, in which the
placebo contained atropine, which causes dryness in the mouth like the active
drugs do. These trials reported very small effects of antidepressants
(standardised mean difference 0•17, 95% confidence interval 0•00–0•34) (6).
This corresponds to about 0.7 on the Hamilton scale, i.e. no effect. Thus,
antidepressants might very well be ineffective (3,5), and they have never been
shown to work for outcomes that really matter like saving relationships and
getting people back to work. In contrast, they cause a lot of harm, e.g. half
the patients develop sexual problems and even when tapering off them slowly,
half the patients have difficulty stopping the drugs because of withdrawal
effects, which can be severe and long-lasting and are very much the same as
those seen on benzodiazepines (3,7). Antidepressants
increase the risk of suicide, at least in young people, and I doubt they are
safe at any age (3). A carefully controlled cohort study of depressed people
over 65 years of age showed that SSRIs more often lead to falls than older
antidepressants or if the depression was left untreated (8). For every 28 elderly people treated for 1
year with an SSRI, there was one additional death, compared to no treatment. McCartney doubts
that this could be true and argues that a cohort study is “capable of finding
association but not causation.” I find the study pretty convincing,
particularly because the authors also did a self-controlled case series
analysis - a within patients comparison, which implicitly removes the effects
of all characteristics that vary between patients. If we want to learn
about the harms of drugs, we cannot afford to dismiss carefully controlled
cohort studies. In fact, randomized short-term drug trials are notoriously
unreliable for this purpose. McCartney
says that she has “no illusions about the effectiveness of antidepressants in
mild to moderate depression.” Since most of those treated have mild or moderate
depression, she contradicts what she said in her headline, “Overprescribing
antidepressants: where’s the evidence?” She is a general practitioner from
Glasgow and should pay a visit to another GP from Glasgow, Des Spence, who
recently concluded about antidepressants: “We are doing harm” (9). 1.
McCartney. Overprescribing antidepressants: where’s the evidence? BMJ
2014;348:g4218. 2. Health at a Glance
2013: OECD indicators. http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Health-at-a-Glance-2013.pdf (last checked 1 July 2014). 3.
Gøtzsche PC. Deadly medicines and organised crime: how big pharma has corrupted
health care. London: Radcliffe Publishing, 2013. 4.
Nielsen M, Gøtzsche P. An analysis of psychotropic drug sales. Increasing sales
of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are closely related to number of
products. Int J Risk Saf Med 2011;23:125–32. 5.
Gøtzsche PC. Why I think antidepressants cause more harm than good. Lancet
Psychiatry 2014 (in press). 6.
Moncrieff J, Wessely S, Hardy R. Active placebos versus antidepressants for
depression. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2004;1:CD003012. 7.
Nielsen M, Hansen EH, Gøtzsche PC. What is the difference between dependence
and withdrawal reactions? A comparison of benzodiazepines and selective
serotonin re- uptake inhibitors. Addiction 2012;107:900–8. 8.
Coupland C, Dhiman P, Morriss R, et al. Antidepressant use and risk of adverse
outcomes in older people: population based cohort study. BMJ 2011;343:d4551. 9.
Spence D. Are antidepressants overprescribed? Yes. BMJ 2013;346:f191.
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