sounding the pharma alarm

[angela bischoff]

Big Bucks Big Pharma - Marketing Disease and Pushing Drugs

Watch it here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6839989630008583884

Big Bucks, Big Pharma pulls back the curtain on the multi-billion dollar
pharmaceutical industry to expose the insidious ways that illness is used,
manipulated, and in some instances created, for capital gain. Focusing on
the industry's marketing practices, media scholars and health
professionals help viewers understand the ways in which direct-to-consumer
(DTC) pharmaceutical advertising glamorizes and normalizes the use of
prescription medication, and works in tandem with promotion to doctors.
Combined, these industry practices shape how both patients and doctors
understand and relate to disease and treatment.

Read a review by Alan Cassels here:
http://commonground.ca/iss/195/cg195_bigbucks.shtml

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What's wrong with being shy?
Oct. 14, 2007

What's wrong with being shy, and just when and how did bashfulness and
other ordinary human behaviors in children and adults become psychiatric
disorders treatable with powerful, potentially dangerous drugs?, asks a
Northwestern University scholar in a new book that already is creating
waves in the mental health community.

In "Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness" (Yale University
Press, October 2007), Northwestern's Christopher Lane chronicles the
"highly unscientific and often arbitrary way" in which widespread
revisions were made to "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders" (DSM), a publication known as the bible of psychiatry that is
consulted daily by insurance companies, courts, prisons and schools as
well as by physicians and mental health workers.

"The number of mental disorders the general population might exhibit
leaped from 180 in 1968 to more than 350 in 1994," notes Lane,
Northwestern's Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor. In a
book that calls into doubt the facade of objective research behind
psychiatry's revolution, Lane questions the rationale for the changes, and
whether all of them were necessary and suitably precise.

By labeling shyness and other human traits as disorders with biological
causes, the doors were opened wide to a pharmaceutical industry ready to
provide a pill for every alleged chemical imbalance or biological problem,
the author says. <snip>

"It might be funny," he says, save for the fact that the DSM's next
edition, due to be completed in 2012, is likely to establish new
categories for apathy, compulsive buying, Internet addiction, binge-eating
and compulsive sexual behavior. Don't look for road rage, however. It's
already in the DSM, under intermittent explosive disorder.

Read full article here:
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=31119

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Depression, anxiety tied to allergies in kids
Fri Oct 19, 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Research in psychiatrically ill children and
adolescents suggests that those with depression, anxiety and other
so-called "internalizing" disorders are more likely to have allergies.

Among a sample of 184 young people being evaluated for psychiatric
disorders and allergies, 105 (57 percent) had a history of allergic
disorders, including asthma, hay fever, hives and eczema. <snip>

Full article continues here:
http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSLAU98027020071019
SOURCE: Journal Clinical Psychiatry, September 2007

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Sounding the Pharma Alarm: Four accounts of the rise of the pharmaceutical
industry

Originally published in Briarpatch Magazine, Sept. 2007

by Angela Bischoff

Oh, the irony. The very generation that rebelliously experimented with
street drugs is now the generation upon whom pharmaceutical drugs are
experimented – with barely a protest.

We baby boomers feed drugs to our kids, ourselves and our parents at
unprecedented rates, and we take these chemicals for longer periods of
time and in greater amounts. Our drug obsession is overloading our livers,
our rivers, our health budgets and our minds.

Shyness, formerly a simple character trait, is now marketed as a disease
with a quick fix; bad relationships are prescribed a magic pill to numb
the anxiety; rowdy kids are hopped up on Ritalin, and our elders are
drugged to dull the effects of isolation and aging.

Drug company profits have outpaced nearly all other industries,
mushrooming into a $500 billion dollar global giant. Not coincidentally,
drug company influence in politics, regulatory agencies, medical research,
education and advertising has become pervasive. Pharmaceutical capitalism
has gripped us by the throat while we shake, begging for our next fix.

Fortunately, a cadre of brilliant critics has recently emerged to spell
out how we got so addicted, and how to kick the pharmaceutical habit.

Continues here: http://www.greenspiration.org/drug/articles/briarpatch.htm
 with book reviews of the following 4 books:

- Let Them Eat Prozac, by Dr. David Healy, 2003
- The Anti-depressant Fact Book: What you doctor won’t tell you about
Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa and Luvox, by Dr. Peter R. Breggin, 2001
- Generation Rx: How prescription drugs are altering American lives,
minds, and bodies, by Greg Critser, 2005
- Selling Sickness: How the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are
turning us all into patients, by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, 2005

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

World Experts Demand End to Child Drugging in the US - Part I and I I
By Evelyn Pringle

Washington, DC: On October 12, 2007, experts in the field of psychiatry
and child development from all over the world arrived in Washington to
attend the annual conference of the International Center for the Study of
Psychiatry and Psychology. This year's conference focused on one specific
goal - to end the mass-prescribing of psychiatric drugs to children.

In addition to the seminars and presentations by psychiatric experts and
academics, other presenters and speakers at the conference varied from
patients and leaders of patient advocacy groups to social workers, nurses,
educators, authors and lawmakers.

The conference included presentations on the serious health risks
associated with the new generation of psychiatric drugs now commonly
prescribed to children, including attention deficit medications,
antidepressant drugs and atypical antipsychotics.

Much of the outrage expressed by speakers and attendees alike stemmed from
the recommendation by the Bush Administration's New Freedom Commission on
Mental Health to conduct "universal" mental illness screening of all
Americans from the age of "0" on up to the oldest living citizen.

Article Part 1 continues here:
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/01509/child-drugging.html?ref=rss
Part 2:
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/articles/01510/child-drugging-fda.html?ref=rss

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Virtually All U.S. Doctors Accept Money, Freebies from Drug Companies

Based on four different papers, published in The New England Journal of
Medicine, the PLoS Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal
Medicine,the efforts to curb drug companies’ courting of your doctors is
still ineffective.

In fact, the industry is working harder than ever to influence which
medicines you are prescribed, by sending out sales representatives with
greater frequency, bringing gifts, meals and offering consulting fees to
high prescribers.

According to the study published in The New England Journal of Medicine,

* 94 percent of doctors have some type of relationship with the drug industry
* 80 percent of doctors commonly accept free food and drug samples
* One-third of doctors were reimbursed by the drug industry for going to
professional meetings or continuing education classes
* 28 percent of doctors have been paid for consulting, giving lectures, or
signing their patients up for clinical trials

Contacts between doctors and sales reps have jumped from an average of 4.4
visits per month in 2000, to an average of:

* 16 times per month with cardiologists
* 9-10 times per month with internists
* 8 times per month with pediatricians
* 4 times per month with surgeons

The only group appearing to be meeting drug company representatives less
often than before is anesthesiologists, who now see reps twice a month.

These sales tactics are working. In the second PLoS Medicine study, visits
by drug detailers (sales reps) prompted nearly half of 97 doctors to
increase their prescriptions for Gabapentin, an anti-seizure drug. In many
cases the reps were advocating the use of Gabapentin for non-approved,
so-called “off-label” uses.

The Journal of General Internal Medicine study found that physicians do
understand the potential conflicts of interest, but that they still view
their meetings with drug reps as both valuable and appropriate. According
to the authors of that study, this proves that the voluntary guidelines
currently in place are inadequate.

[Each med article is free online]

The New England Journal of Medicine April 26, 2007; 356:1742-1750 (
<http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/17/1742>http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/17/1742

PLoS Medicine April, 2007; 4(4):e150
<http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1876413&blobtype=pdf>http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1876413&blobtype=pdf

PLoS Medicine April, 2007; 4(4):e134
<http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-pdf&file=10.1371_journal.pmed.0040134-L.pdf>http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-pdf&file=10.1371_journal.pmed.0040134-L.pdf

Journal of General Internal Medicine February, 2007; 22(2): 184–190
<http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1824740&blobtype=pdf>http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1824740&blobtype=pdf

Washington Post April 28, 2007
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042800896_pf.html>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042800896_pf.html

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