(Healingtalks) According to Medco Health Solutions Inc., which manages prescription benefits for about 1 in 5 Americans, over half of Americans are prescription-addicted or daily taking prescription medications for chronic health problems

Breakdown of Prescription Drug Taking

The data indicates that 51 percent of American children and adults were taking one or more prescription drugs for a chronic condition, up from 47 percent in 2001 – about a 10% increase. This breaks down into age groups as follows:

• Women 20+ – About 2 out of 3
  
• Children and teenagers – 25%
  
• Adult men – 52 %
  
• Seniors over 65 – 75%

What’s worse, on average 1 in 4 seniors take five or more medicines regularly ( 28 percent of women and 22 percent of men over 65)

Exactly what medications?

In 2006, the top five drugs by sales were Lipitor, Nexium, Prevacid, Advair Diskus and Singulair.

Multi-billion dollar sales drugs, what they claim to do

• Lipitor offers to lower cholesterol
• Nexium & Prevacid claim to reduce stomach acid
• Advair Diskus and Singulair suppress asthma and allergies symptoms

Failings of Modern Medicine

These drugs  reveal much about the failings of the mainstream medical model

Treating and suppressing symptoms – cholesterol and stomach acid are both normal, protective substances in the body. Cholesterol is no more the cause of heart disease than stomach acid is the cause of GERD or ulcers. But one of the fundamental flaws of western medicine is its tendency to treat the symptom or effect rather than the cause. Unfortunately for patients, doing so can actually make things worse, not better.

Cholesterol is essential – it plays many essential roles in the body, and lowering it does not only not prevent heart disease, but can actually increase the risk of dying from a heart attack.

Stomach acids are essential – crucial in protecting us from the pathogens we might otherwise ingest with food. Stomach acid is also required for protein digestion. It is well-established in the scientific literature that the primary cause of ulcers is a bacterium called h. pylori – not stomach acid. And there is also evidence suggesting that GERD (gastro-esophageal reflux disease) is caused by low – not high – stomach acid.

Scariest part of this study

It is the surge in children who use of chemical drugs to treat weight-related problems illnesses previously considered adult problems. Medco estimates 1.2 million American children now are taking pills for Type 2 diabetes, sleeping troubles and gastrointestinal problems such as heartburn.

Reversible Conditions

The majority of these conditions – diabetes, sleeping troubles and gastrointestinal issues – can be treated and reversed or eliminated by simple diet and lifestyle changes – rather than having someone addicted to drugs in a profitable sick care system.  These changes have none of the adverse effects and risks of drugs, and their benefits extend far beyond the potential therapeutic action of the medications.

Drugs-of-necessity gloried to lure us to take drugs-of-profitablity for life

Medication has improved and even saved the lives of many in this country and around the world. Yet there’s a difference between drugs that are “medically necessary” and drugs that are promoted via slick campaigns and to be used instead of the more effective and less harmful diet and exercise approaches. Patients are lured in for a quick fix, and via no less diabolical means than effected in the sale of illegal drugs.

Why the rise in medication

One reason for the increase in medication use is the pharmaceutical industry’s “relentless advertising”. Since that is unlikely to change anytime soon, experts say the proportion of Americans on chronic medications can only multiply. On a deeper level, it is a further evolution of a progressive application of the surface/symptom illusionary, math-based, mechanical vision of nature of the 17th century. It is part of a 400 year trend to unrelenting expand a central paradigm understanding, that nature is essentially mathematical- resulting in a progressive and deep harming of not only our bodies but the entire planet’s life as a whole. This is a deep philosophical subject we’ve discussed in many posts, and how to supplant the mechanical vision with a life centered, truly healing view.

Comments

“Unless we do things to change the way we’re managing health in this country … things will get worse instead of getting better,” predicted Daniel Jones, a heart specialist and dean of the University of Mississippi’s medical school. Luckily, we don’t have to wait around for that to happen. As individuals we can take responsibility for our own health care using diet, exercise and lifestyle changes. We can choose to use “alternative” modalities to keep us healthy. And we can take action to reduce stress and promote emotional and psychological well-being.

Recommended Links

• Americans Taking Prescription Drugs in Greater Numbers
• Healthcare vs Sickcare

America Conned: Psycho Pharma Empire Under Fire

America Conned: Psycho Pharma Empire Under Fire

by Monica G. Young
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Is America truly stricken with widespread mental illness? Do tens of millions need mind-altering drugs? A recent flurry of media articles lead readers to a realization that Big Pharma and the “mental health” industry have deceived Americans on a grand scale.

The “New York Review of Books” two-part article by Dr. Marcia Angell, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, summarizes it extremely well. She analyzes three books by authors Irving Kirsch, Robert Whitaker, and Daniel Carlat. Each deconstructs the apparent mental illness epidemic and theory that mental disorders stem from brain chemical imbalances which can be corrected by drugs.

Dr. Angell’s review has sparked a host of other journalists to applaud her and fuel the fire. An article in Forbes even concludes, “psychopharma is looking like an idea whose time has passed.”

Overview of how Big Pharma conned America

• 10% of Americans over age six take antidepressants.
• Antipsychotic drugs, once reserved for schizophrenics, have become the top-selling class of drugs in the US, with over $14 billion in sales in 2009.
• ADHD, bipolar and autism diagnoses have exploded in the past two decades with at least 5 million US kids now on psychiatric drugs.
• 10% of boys take drugs for ADHD.
• Half a million kids take antipsychotics, including preschoolers.

The Chemical Imbalance Theory

This rose to fame when Prozac hit the market in 1987, accompanied by massive hype that it corrected a chemical deficiency in the brain. In the years that followed, the number of people prescribed drugs for mental illness skyrocketed. Today, “treatment” for mental disorders is synonymous with psychoactive (mind-altering) drugs.

Tracing the origin of this theory shows it wasn’t that chemical imbalances were discovered in the mentally ill and then drugs were devised to correct the imbalance. Instead, drugs created for other purposes were incidentally found to also affect brain chemicals and blunt mental symptoms. Drug companies, hungry for new markets, and psychiatry, eager to build stature in the medical arena, leapt on this. They conducted a vast campaign to popularize chemical imbalances as the cause of mental disturbance and push drugs as the answer.

As Dr. Angell writes, “instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality, an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.” “Or similarly,” she says, “one could argue that fevers are caused by too little aspirin.”

Many scientific studies disprove the chemical imbalance theory.

• After fifteen years of research, Irving Kirsch – psychologist and author of “The Emperor’s New Drugs” – concludes, “It now seems beyond question that the traditional account of depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain is simply wrong.” Research studies show psychoactive medications actually disrupt brain chemistry and causes the brain to function abnormally.

• This year prominent neuroscientist, Dr. Nancy Andreason, announced proof that antipsychotics shrink the brain.

• Studies also demonstrate that long-term recovery rates are higher for non-medicated patients. For instance, the World Health Organization conducted an investigation in fifteen cities around the world and out of 740 depressed individuals studied, those that weren’t on psychiatric drugs had the best long term outcomes.
• In the pre-medication era, it was known that with time, people usually recovered from depression. If kids had tantrums, were unruly or shy, they were apt to outgrow it.

Today, individuals branded with disorders are likely to receive long-lasting diagnoses, endless prescriptions and the poorer ones tend to remain on disability for life.

Big Pharma manipulation

Dr. Marcia Angell says the author of each of the three books agrees on “the disturbing extent to which the companies that sell psychoactive drugs – through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery – have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated.”According to IMS Health, an information and consulting company, pharmaceutical companies spent $6.1 billion in 2010 in marketing to US doctors.

• Another $4 billion was spent on direct-to-patient advertising.
• The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – the psychiatric bible of mental disorders, used in prescribing drugs – Dr. Angell points out “in all of its editions, it has simply reflected the opinions of its writers.” The majority of the psychiatrists involved in creating the current edition had financial ties to drug companies.
• Drug trials, used to bring a drug to market, are funded by drug companies, heavily biased and misleading. Companies may sponsor as many trials as they like until they have just two positive ones to submit to the FDA. Great care is taken to hide negative trials. The highly positive results of placebo trials are downplayed: a high percentage of patients recover on a fake drug (like a sugar pill) – proving that the more a person believes he will benefit from a treatment, the more likely he will experience a benefit.
• Author Daniel Carlat points out that “psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies.”

Big Pharma’s crime against humanity

And where has the “mental health” industry and “drug therapy” brought our nation?

As Americans line up at their local pharmacy, documented side effects are legion: weight gain, deadened emotions, diabetes, heart problems, liver damage, stunted growth in kids, shortened life spans and on and on. Those prescribed one psychoactive drug are commonly prescribed another to address side-effects, with many on daily cocktails of meds.An estimated 2.2 million Americans are hospitalized each year for adverse drug reactions.

• Over 100,000 die from them.
• Instead of decreasing, the number of adults on disability pay for mental illness has soared 250% since 1987.
• For kids it’s a 35X increase.

The greatest crime to humanity is the mass drugging of children. Yet it’s perpetrated within schools, doctor offices, foster homes and juvenile facilities daily.

There is good news. In the past few years, drug companies have faced a rise of multi-billion dollar class action suits. The key popularizer of childhood bipolar and antipsychotics for kids, Dr. Joseph Biederman, was publicly sanctioned by Harvard Medical School for failing to report $1.6 million he pocketed from drug companies. Some drugmakers are steering away from pursuing new psychoactive drugs.

Big Pharma Telling A Big Lie

Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

This chemical-imbalance/drug therapy lie has been told big enough and repeated enough, that much of America believes it. Isn’t it time we all put a stop to it?

Key articles:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arc…

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arc…

Additional sources include:

http://www.pri.org/health/big-pharm…

http://english.aljazeera.net/indept…

http://www.catholicculture.org/news…

http://blogs.forbes.com/greatspecul…

http://www.businessinsider.com/zypr…

http://blogs.forbes.com/investor/20…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maril…