April 30, 2006


DISCUSS AMONGST YOURSELVES!

I know what I think about pathologizing absolutely EVERYTHING!
And it isn't GOOD psychiatry that is the problem ..
although the Chinese do quite, quite well without it,
it's that they are usually to be just such very good
dispensers of SOMA.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/life_a-roy_murt_060628_mediclizing_22_disea.htm


Subject(s): Health Drugs, Health Psychiatry, Health Psychology, Health, Mental Health

April 28, 2006

Medicalizing " Disease " For Fun And Profit
by Roy Murtishaw


http://www.opednews.com


According to a set of essays published in the Public Library of Science Medicine, drug companies are systematically inventing non-existent diseases, or exaggerating minor ones, in order to sell more of their products.

The practice turns healthy people into patients, and places many of them at risk of medically induced harm.

Minor, normal problems, such as the symptoms of menopause, have been "medicalized" into treatable illnesses, and risk factors like high cholesterol are being treated as diseases in their own right. Conditions including female sexual dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and "restless legs syndrome" have all been exaggerated and promoted by companies hoping to sell drugs.

Even ordinary shyness is often defined by drug companies as a social anxiety disorder to be treated with antidepressants.

Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, pointed out that some countries, including Britain, have legal safeguards against drug industry "disease mongering." Most of the criticisms, he argued, apply primarily to countries like the United States, where drugs can be advertised directly to patients.

Public Library of Science Medicine April 11, 2006; 3(4)
Times Online April 11, 2006
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Psychiatry is the worst offender, in my opinion. ~ Roy
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A life-long friend challenged me about my comments regarding the role of psychiatry in medicalizing diseases.:

@aol.com wrote:
I think I knew that! We've got enough 'real' diseases to contend with in this life, right? But why do you comment that psychiatry is the worst offender....your previous bread-and-butter of sorts, no less?
Gail

My response follows :

Dear Gail,

Please! I am a psychologist... NOT a PSYCHIATRIST!! In fact, I despise psychiatry. My experience was psychiatrists were often incredibly poor physicians .. borne out by the fact Psychiatry attracts the absolutely worst medical students, In fact , the old saw that a psychiatrist is a "Former med student who could never learn to tolerate the sight of blood " is fairly accurate. However the situation is even worse now as psychiatry has been nearly abandoned by native-born Americans and is now filled with foreign trained doctors; many of whom barely speak English...I kid you not.

Psychiatry has always grossly over-relied upon drugs, over-prescribed them in both quantity and quality. Psychoactive drugs claim the most addiction complications of any substances excepting nicotine in America and has owned that distinction since the 1960s. Valium,Ritalin,Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, etc.are incredibly dangerous and are being prescibed by the millions willy-nilly by idiots otherwise called physicians all over this country every day. I strongly encourage your Yahooing and/or Googling the wonderful Evelyn Pringle's perceptive articles concerning these issues; many of which are found at www.opednews.com
Roy



I'm a 62 year-old disabled psychotherapist who is a proud liberal despite living amidst extreme conservatives all my life. I have also been a single father to a 36-year-old Lawrence Berkley liberal and am now a single father of a 12-year-old budding liberal.

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3 comments:

saminkie said...

Hi to all, am a resident doctor in psychiatry, and am not idiot as that psychologist say, nor am afraid from blood, am iraqi, worked as resident doctor in surgery for one year in 2004 in Babylon .... it is war in iraq so imagine the things I had seen in the surgical emergency unit that time... well , no one can say that blood is nice looking , but am not a bad clinician... but psychiatry is a science I like since when I was a teenager...
There is what is called EVIDENCE BASED MEDECINE since 1980s or before maybe. To make it simple to understant what that means I say : the facts in medecine these days always contain NUMBERS ! e.g. we do not say these days that schizophrenia run in famillies, but we say like this " in a classic twin study of schizophrenia, Gottesman & Shields (1972) found in their sample 11 concordanct and 11 disconcordant pairs of monozygotic twins and 3 concordant and 30 disconcordant in dizygotic pairs of twins.

And believe me all drugs can be hazardous if you do not use them right but valium is very safe... it is safer than paracetamol (PANADOL) in overdose....

ladybroadoak said...

It was kind of you to write. I have been studying mental health issues a long time. I just picked off this article because I think it is important that people see that this issue is important to the "planetary healers" learning curve. I surely do NOT agree with it 100%. But in order to claim back our power as individuals we need to look at psycho-business very closely ... I sent you all my best and am up for any discussion you wish to pursue about any of this.

Spiritual Emergency said...

Well geez, I'm willing to wade in and stick my foot in my mouth.

Here's my gist: I like psychiatrists. Or at least, I think I do... or did. Or something like that.

Trouble arose several weeks ago when I ran into one, and then another one on the net. Those psychiatrists and I, seem to have a difference of opinion. Our difference centers around this statement: Schizophrenia is incurable. That's their line and they're sticking to it.

I disagree. I believe that some forms of schizophrenia are incurable but many, many people do make full recoveries. I also believe that it's damaging to a client to give them a diagnosis like "schizophrenia" and then tell them that essentially, they will never, ever recover. I say all that from the position of an individual who went through a schizophrenic break and made a full recovery -- without hospitals, without doctors, without any form of psychiatric medication.

The docs tell me I'm wrong and they're the experts so that's the end of it. Meanwhile, I've put together an entire blog demonstrating that I think I'm right, and why I think I am. For their part, the docs have no doubt, written me off as a quack, a whacko, a budding scientologist, an anti-psychiatrist with a chip on my shoulder. And yet...

I used to like psychiatrists and admire many of them. And I think I still do. But I'm highly-selective in terms of where I place my admiration, my trust, or my faith. However, at least I've been stripped of some of my "delusions". I'll give them that.

[For what it's worth, I tend to like psychologists too. Unless they tell me I'm incurable, unredeemable, and hopeless.]

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