Mar 17

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Who is Patrick McGorry and what does he promote?  He’s a psychiatrist just named Australian of the Year for his work in “youth mental health reform.”  What does that reform consist of?  What he calls a “new form of climate change.” It sure is.

[See TIME Magazine Article "Drugs Before Diagnosis?"]

He not only promotes youths being put on antipsychotics and antidepressants, cited by international drug regulatory agencies as causing hallucinations, hostility, personality change, life-threatening diabetes, strokes, suicide and death, McGorry goes a giant step further-drug them before they’ve even developed a “psychiatric” disorder.

The Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AHRPP) likens such concepts to “performing mastectomies on women who are at risk of-but do not have-breast cancer.”[i]

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed “serious concerns” about child drugging and Senate investigations in the United States have found high profile psychiatrists who were pharmaceutically funded and using fraudulent research being among the heaviest promoters of psychiatric drug use on children. While the rest of the world is experiencing serious alarm at the rampant use of deadly psychiatric drugs on children, McGorry pushes full steam ahead to increase the amount of children being needlessly subjected to psychiatry’s most powerful drugs-antidepressants and antipsychotics.

His theory and practices are so controversial that even his colleagues in the United States have backed away from it.  And a parallel study done in the United States based on the same theory that McGorry uses was considered an abject failure-even by the investigators themselves.  Other psychiatrists have criticized McGorry’s pre-drugging practice as unethical and harmful to adolescents.  More on that later.

This is especially so as the “symptoms” McGorry and cohorts invented to “pre-label” youths as potential candidates for psychosis and “schizophrenia” (to start with) are, according to one U.S. psychiatrist, “remarkably common…adolescence is a period of life that is normally marked by tumultuous changes in personality.”

And what was the first thing he did to capitalize on his winning his “Australian of the Year” award?  He demanded the Australian government hand over another $200 million to fund more of his centers where he can drug more children.  Worse, the government is entertaining the idea. Continue reading »

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Dec 02

GROUP psychology involving Buddhist meditation can be as effective at combating depression as medication, a study published today in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology has found.

Fifteen months after an eight-week trial, 47 per cent of people with depression who under-went therapy suffered a relapse, compared with 60 per cent of those taking antidepressants.

Published Date: 01 December 2008

Source: Scotsman

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Oct 23

The placebo effect is created by your perception and belief, so it is really all about the power of your mind that you have given to a certain medicine that it will cure you.

Placebos are estimated to have an effective rate of about 30-50%. If the placebo effect is really the power of your mind then concentrating on healing yourself will bring equal results if you would believe equally in the power of your own mind as you do in useless antidepressants (Antidepressant drugs don’t work - official study).

If 30-50% effectiveness is for ‘untrained’ healers, then what if you would focus to increase your healing ability every day of your life?

Highly recommended:
Dr. Bruce Lipton Ph.D.: The New Biology - Where Mind and Matter Meet
(Please watch this video. It will change your life forever. Bruce Lipton’s book
The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles was awarded to be the best science book 2006.)

PS: Isn’t western medicine accusing alternative medicine practitioners of selling ’snake oil’ and placebos to their patients?!!!
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Half of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos

Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.

The study involved 679 internists and rheumatologists chosen randomly from a national list of such doctors. In response to three questions included as part of the larger survey, about half reported recommending placebos regularly. Surveys in Denmark, Israel, Britain, Sweden and New Zealand have found similar results.

The most common placebos the American doctors reported using were headache pills and vitamins, but a significant number also reported prescribing antibiotics and sedatives. Although these drugs, contrary to the usual definition of placebos, are not inert, doctors reported using them for their effect on patients’ psyches, not their bodies.

In most cases, doctors who recommended placebos described them to patients as “a medicine not typically used for your condition but might benefit you,” the survey found. Only 5 percent described the treatment to patients as “a placebo.”

The study is being published in BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. One of the authors, Franklin G. Miller, was among the medical ethicists who said they were troubled by the results.

“This is the doctor-patient relationship, and our expectations about being truthful about what’s going on and about getting informed consent should give us pause about deception,” said Dr. Miller, director of the research ethics program in the department of bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Continue reading »

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Sep 23

The Montreal water treatment plant dumps 90 times the critical amount of certain estrogen products into the river. It only takes one nanogram (ng) of steroids per liter of water to disrupt the endocrinal system of fish and decrease their fertility.

These are the findings of Liza Viglino, postdoctoral student at the Universite de Montreal’s Department of Chemistry, at the NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Drinking Water Treatment and Distribution, who is under the supervision of Professors Sebastien Sauve and Michèle Prevost.

The presence and effects of estrogen residues on aquatic wildlife are well documented. However, this research is unique because it didn’t only consider natural hormones and those used in oral contraceptives - it also included products used in hormone therapy that is prescribed to menopausal women.

Continue reading »

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Jun 11

Related articles:
- Antidepressant drugs don’t work - official study

- Tranquillisers putting children’s lives at risk

- Vaccines and Medical Experiments on Children, Minorities, Woman and Inmates (1845 - 2007)

- The REAL brain drain: Modern technology is changing the way our brains work, says neuroscientist

- America’s Medicated Army

Three prominent advocates of antidepressant use by children received millions of dollars from antidepressant manufacturers, casting into question the integrity of their already-controversial research.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Harvard University psychiatrists Joseph Biederman and Timothy Wilens received $1.6 million each from drug companies between 2000 and 2007. Thomas Spencer, another Harvard psychiatrist, received $1 million.

The payments were uncovered by Congressional investigators searching for conflict-of-interest violations. Federal law requires researchers who receive National Institutes of Health funding to report annual outside earnings above $10,000 to their universities. Biederman, Wilens and Spencer all took NIH money, but never reported the full extent of their drug company income.

That the researchers’ results were influenced by the payments isn’t clear, but the situation is ugly. Biederman has a very high profile; as the Times describes, he

is one of the most influential researchers in child psychiatry and is widely admired for focusing the field’s attention on its most troubled young patients. Although many of his studies are small and often financed by drug makers, his work helped to fuel a controversial 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder … and a rapid rise in the use of antipsychotic medicines in children.

Childhood antidepressant use is hotly debated by scientists: it’s not clear whether they work as well in kids as in adults, and the drugs may have profound effects on still-developing brains.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), leader of the Congressional investigation, has pushed for a national registry of commercial payments to researchers.

Image: Refracted Moments

See Also:

Apr 09

· Anti-psychotics may cause long-term harm, say critics
· Youngsters under 6 being given unlicensed drugs

New evidence has shown children’s lives are being put at risk by a surge in the use of controversial tranquillising drugs which are being prescribed to control their behaviour, the Guardian has learned.

The anti-psychotic drugs are being given to youngsters under the age of six even though the drugs have no licence for use in children except in certain schizophrenia cases, the report says.

The number of children on the drugs has doubled since the early 1990s as the UK begins to follow a trend started in the US, but critics say they are a “chemical cosh” that could cause premature death. Continue reading »

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Mar 15

They are among the biggest-selling drugs of all time, the “happiness pills” that supposedly lift the moods of those who suffer depression and are taken by millions of people in the UK every year.But one of the largest studies of modern antidepressant drugs has found that they have no clinically significant effect. In other words, they don’t work.

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Six capsules of Prozac Continue reading »

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