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Turning human emotions into pathology
There is a unhealthy practice in our country today of turning unbalanced human emotions and mental states into a pathology that can only be cured by taking a daily dose of medications. This has created a huge industry creating hundreds of billions of dollars of revenues for the pharmaceutical and related companies.The 7 Keys feels as many in the field do that this drugging of children and adults has gotten out of hand and the pendulum must begin to swing back to center to stop focusing on modifying symptoms but to get to the underlying causes of poor decision making in life and lifestyle choices.The following congressional testimony addresses this.
In the testimony of Peter R. Breggin, M.D., Director, International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Committee on Education and the Workforce US House Of Representative September 29, 2000
Parents throughout the country are being pressured and coerced by schools to give psychiatric drugs to their children. Teachers, school psychologists, and administrators commonly make dire threats about their inability to teach children without medicating them.
They sometimes suggest that only medication can stave off a bleak future of delinquency and occupational failure. They even call child protective services to investigate parents for child neglect and they sometimes testify against parents in court. Often the schools recommend particular physicians who favor the use of stimulant drugs to control behavior. These stimulant drugs include methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta, and Metadate) or forms of amphetamine (Dexedrine and Adderall).
My purpose today is to provide to this committee, parents, teachers, counselors and other concerned adults a scientific basis for rejecting the use of stimulants for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or for the control of behavior in the classroom or home.
I. Escalating Rates of Stimulant Prescription Stimulant drugs, including methylphenidate and amphetamine, were first approved for the control of behavior in children during the mid-1950s. Since then, there have been periodic attempts to promote their usage, and periodic public reactions against the practice. In fact, the first Congressional hearings critical of stimulant medication were held in the early 1970s when an estimated 100,000-200,000 children were receiving these drugs.
Since the early 1990s, North America has turned to psychoactive drugs in unprecedented numbers for the control of children. In November 1999, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) warned about a record six-fold increase in Ritalin production between 1990 and 1995. In 1995, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a agency of the World Health Organization, deplored that "10 to 12 percent of all boys between the ages 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD and are being treated with methylphenidate [Ritalin]." The United States uses approximately 90% of the world's Ritalin.
The number of children on these drugs has continued to escalate. A recent study in Virginia indicated that up to 20% of white boys in the fifth grade were receiving stimulant drugs during the day from school officials. Another study from North Carolina showed that 10% of children were receiving stimulant drugs at home or in school.
A recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Zito and her colleagues has demonstrated a three-fold increase in the prescription of stimulants to 2-4 year old toddlers.
II. The Dangers of Stimulant Medication
Stimulant medications are far more dangerous than most practitioners and published experts seem to realize. I summarized many of these effects in my scientific presentation on the mechanism of action and adverse effects of stimulant drugs to the November 1998 NIH Consensus Development Conference on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and then published more detailed analyzes in several scientific sources.
Table I summarizes many of the most salient adverse effects of all the commonly used stimulant drugs. It is important to note that the Drug Enforcement Administration, and all other drug enforcement agencies worldwide, classify methylphenidate (Ritalin) and amphetamine (Dexedrine and Adderall) in the sameSchedule II category as methamphetamine, cocaine, and the most potent opiates and barbiturates. Schedule II includes only those drugs with the very highest potential for addiction and abuse.
It should have been no surprise when Nadine Lambert presented data at the Consensus Development Conference indicating that prescribed stimulant use in childhood predisposes the individual to cocaine abuse in young adulthood.
Furthermore, their addiction and abuse potential is based on the capacity of these drugs to drastically and permanently change brain chemistry. Studies of amphetamine show that short-term clinical doses produce brain cell death. Similar studies of methylphenidate show long-lasting and sometimes permanent changes in the biochemistry of the brain.
All stimulants impair growth not only by suppressing appetite but also by disrupting growth hormone production. This poses a threat to every organ of the body, including the brain, during the child's growth. The disruption of neurotransmitter systems adds to this threat.
These drugs also endanger the cardiovascular system and commonly produce many adverse mental effects, including depression.
Too often stimulants become gateway drugs to illicit drugs. As noted, the use of prescription stimulants predisposes children to cocaine and nicotine abuse in young adulthood.
Stimulants even more often become gateway drugs to additional psychiatric medications. Stimulant-induced over-stimulation, for example, is often treated with addictive or dangerous sedatives, while stimulant-induced depression is often treated with dangerous, unapproved antidepressants. As the child's emotional control breaks down due to medication effects, mood stabilizers may be added. Eventually, these children end up on four or five psychiatric drugs at once and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder by the age of eight or ten.
, provided that the parents or other interested adults are willing to learn new approaches to disciplining and caring for the children. Consultations with the school, a change of teachers or schools, and home schooling can also help to meet the needs of children without resort to medication.
The Depressing News About Antidepressants For The Millions Taking Them
Studies suggest that the popular drugs are no more effective than a
placebo. In fact, they may be worse.
By *Sharon Begley * | NEWSWEEK Published Jan 29, 2010 Excerpts from the magazine issue dated Feb 8, 2010
As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.
. That first analysis, in 1998, examined 38 manufacturer- sponsored studies involving just over 3,000 depressed patients. The authors, psychology researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein of the University of Connecticut, saw---as everyone else had---that patients did improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that dates from the 1950s. This improvement, demonstrated in scores of clinical trials, is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work. But when Kirsch compared the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills---clinical trials typically compare an experimental drug with a placebo---he saw that the difference was minuscule. Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs. Put another way, three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect.
The study's impact? The number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.
Kirsch's study and, now, others conclude that the lion's share of the drugs' effect comes from the fact that patients expect to be helped
by them, and not from any direct chemical action on the brain,
especially for anything short of very severe depression.
Out of the blue, he received a letter from Thomas Moore, who was then a health-policy analyst at George Washington University. You could expand your data set, Moore wrote, by including everything drug companies sent to the FDA---published studies, like those analyzed in "Hearing Placebo," but also unpublished studies. In 1998 Moore used the Freedom of Information Act to pry such data from the FDA. The total came to 47 company-sponsored studies---on Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor, Serzone, and Celexa---that Kirsch and colleagues then pored over. (As an aside, it turned out that about 40 percent of the clinical trials had never been published. That is significantly higher than for other classes of drugs, says Lisa Bero of the University of California, San Francisco; overall, 22 percent of clinical trials of drugs are not published. "By and large," says Kirsch, "the unpublished studies were those that had failed to show a significant benefit from taking the actual drug.") In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, he and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants- --not the 75 percent he had calculated from examining only published studies---had also been achieved by a dummy pill.
Drug companies do not dispute Kirsch's aggregate statistics. Unfortunately, the serotonin-deficit theory of depression is built on a foundation of tissue paper. The theory hasn't a leg to stand on. Direct evidence doesn't exist. "If depression can be equally affected by drugs that increase serotonin and by drugs that decrease it," says Kirsch, "it's hard to imagine how the benefits can be due to their chemical activity."
-With Sarah Kliff
Find this article at http://www.newsweek .com/id/232781
I have learned many ways to activate an individuals endocrine system through the Quantum Embodiment methods of psychoneuroimmunology and other techniques. I use these to help activate the needed neuropeptides to return a person to balance and optimum functioning. The 6 to 9 million children currently taken these drugs are only one part of the problem as tens of millions of adults now take these and other psychotropic drugs like anti-depressants.There are 100 million prescription each year written in our country for ADD/ADHD and anti-depressant drugs! These drugs have such a high percentage of negative side effects (40%!) that they become life threatening in themselves.
In fact the leading causes of death and their number of deaths are according to a special study on Dr. Gary Null found:
- Iatrogenic 783,936 (induced inadvertently by a physician, surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures!
- Heart disease: 699,69
- Cancer: 553,251
- Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 135,952
- Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 127,924
- Accidents (unintentional injuries): 123,706.
#Self Improvement #Transformation #Healing #Forgiveness #A Course in Miracles #ADHD #ADD #Stress management # Miracles #Self help #Attention Development # Emotional Wellness #Emotional Intelligence # Quantum Embodiment’