The biggest puzzle is the huge success of antipsychotic drugs. Despite their dangerous side effect and narrow indications, they are being given out like candy. Antipsychotics have proven usefulness only in treating the disabling symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but this has not stopped drug company seduction promoting their general use for anyone having trouble sleeping, or run-of-the-mill anxiety, or depression, or irritability, or eccentricity, or the temper tantrums of youth, or the crankiness of old age. More than 3 million Americans are already on board, with a (shareholder satisfying) growth rate of 20 percent a year. The number of prescriptions for antipsychotics has doubled in ten years, up to 54 million and counting. Off-label use has also doubled—undeterred by the big fines that don’t seem so big when you consider the ill-gotten gains they enable. How could this happen? Big bucks. An advertising budget of $2.4 billion per year spent on Abilify and Seroquel has catapulted these two very so-so and not-so-safe drugs to fifth and sixth place as revenue producers among all of the many medications sold in America. The full court press on primary care doctors as them inappropriately prescribing an antipsychotic for 20 percent of all their anxiety disorder patients. This massive misuse of antipsychotics is crazy and shameful—a triumph of marketing might over common sense and good medical practice.
Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," pg.105
2 comments:
All drugs have side effects. The side effects are the actual effects of the medication. Almost no studies are done on the physical effects of taking more than one prescription drug at a time. How many things are most Americans over 50 taking?
Even taken alone (which they seldom are), anti-psychotics are particularly toxic to the mind and body. According to Saiontz and Kirk, ABILIFY, ZYPREXA, RISPERDAL, and SEROQUEL have been linked to:
* Diabetes
* Hyperglycemia
* Pancreatitis
* Ketoacidosis (diabetic coma)
* Tardive Dyskinesia (involuntary movements of the face)
Just search online for reports from people talking about their struggles with the side effects of anti-psychotics. This is a bad business.
Alec
Drs. David M. Tyler and Kurt P. Grady, in their book, "ADHD: Deceptive Diagnosis," demonstrate the dangers of psychotropic drugs, and how no one really knows what they do or how they do it, and how, essentially, everyone taking them are being used as guinea pigs. The book raises alarms on the whole idea of false diagnoses and created "diseases" used to justify the use of drugs which have been invented but for which there had been no use for. It's a real scam, which is enriching the pharmaceutical industries.
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