Has America Become a Nation of Psychotics on Psychotics?

(photovecteezy)

An article reprint by James Ridgeway who writes for The Guardian newspaper, and is the senior Washington correspondent for Mother Jones magazine.

You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
Once upon a time, antipsychotics were reserved for a relatively small number of patients with hard-core psychiatric diagnoses - primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder - to treat such symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, or formal thought disorder. Today, it seems, everyone is taking antipsychotics. Parents are told that their unruly kids are in fact bipolar, and in need of anti-psychotics, while old people with dementia are dosed, in large numbers, with drugs once reserved largely for schizophrenics. Americans with symptoms ranging from chronic depression to anxiety to insomnia are now being prescribed anti-psychotics at rates that seem to indicate a national mass psychosis.
It is anything but a coincidence that the explosion in antipsychotic use coincides with the pharmaceutical industry's development of a new class of medications known as "atypical antipsychotics." Beginning with Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Seroquel in the 1990s, followed by Abilify in the early 2000s, these drugs were touted as being more effective than older antipsychotics like Haldol and Thorazine. More importantly, they lacked the most noxious side effects of the older drugs - in particular, the tremors and other motor control problems.
The atypical anti-psychotics were the bright new stars in the pharmaceutical industry's roster of psychotropic drugs - costly, patented medications that made people feel and behave better without any shaking or drooling. Sales grew steadily, until by 2009 Seroquel and Abilify numbered fifth and sixth in annual drug sales, and prescriptions written for the top three atypical antipsychotics totaled more than 20 million. Suddenly, antipsychotics weren't just for psychotics any more.
Not just for psychotics anymore
By now, just about everyone knows how the drug industry works to influence the minds of American doctors, plying them with gifts, junkets, ego-tripping awards, and research funding in exchange for endorsing or prescribing the latest and most lucrative drugs. "Psychiatrists are particularly targeted by Big Pharma because psychiatric diagnoses are very subjective," says Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, whose Pharmed Out project tracks the industry's influence on American medicine, and who last month hosted a conference on the subject at Georgetown. A shrink can't give you a blood test or an MRI to figure out precisely what's wrong with you. So it's often a case of diagnosis by prescription. (If you feel better after you take an anti-depressant, it's assumed that you were depressed.) As the researchers in one study of the drug industry's influence put it, "the lack of biological tests for mental disorders renders psychiatry especially vulnerable to industry influence." For this reason, they argue, it's particularly important that the guidelines for diagnosing and treating mental illness be compiled "on the basis of an objective review of the scientific evidence" - and not on whether the doctors writing them got a big grant from Merck or own stock in AstraZeneca
Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and a leading critic of the Big Pharma, puts it more bluntly: "Psychiatrists are in the pocket of industry." Angell has pointed out that most of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental health clinicians, have ties to the drug industry. Likewise, a 2009 study showed that 18 out of 20 of the shrinks who wrote the American Psychiatric Association's most recent clinical guidelines for treating depression, bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies.

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent "raging epidemic of mental illness" among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should "expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising." Instead, "the tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in seventy-six. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades. Mental illness is now the leading cause of disability in children." Under the tutelage of Big Pharma, we are "simply expanding the criteria for mental illness so that nearly everyone has one." Fugh-Berman agrees: In the age of aggressive drug marketing, she says, "Psychiatric diagnoses have expanded to include many perfectly normal people."
Cost benefit analysis
What's especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old - vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggest that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.
Carl Elliott reports in Mother Jones magazine: "Once bipolar disorder could be treated with atypicals, rates of diagnoses rose dramatically, especially in children. According to a recent Columbia University study, the number of children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder rose 40-fold between 1994 and 2003." And according to another study, "one in five children who visited a psychiatrist came away with a prescription for an antipsychotic drug."
A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida's juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, "routinely" doling them out "for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators." The numbers are staggering: "In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That's enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day." Further, the paper discovered that "One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications."
In addition to expanding the diagnoses of serious mental illness, drug companies have encouraged doctors to prescribe atypical anti-psychotics for a host of off-label uses. In one particularly notorious episode, the drugmaker Eli Lilly pushed Zyprexa on the caregivers of old people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as agitation, anxiety, and insomnia. In selling to nursing home doctors, sales reps reportedly used the slogan "five at five"meaning that five milligrams of Zyprexa at 5 pm would sedate their more difficult charges. The practice persisted even after FDA had warned Lilly that the drug was not approved for such uses, and that it could lead to obesity and even diabetes in elderly patients.

In a video interview conducted in 2006, Sharham Ahari, who sold Zyprexa for two years at the beginning of the decade, described to me how the sales people would wangle the doctors into prescribing it. At the time, he recalled, his doctor clients were giving him a lot of grief over patients who were "flipping out" over the weight gain associated with the drug, along with the diabetes. "We were instructed to downplay side effects and focus on the efficacy of drug…to recommend the patient drink a glass a water before taking a pill before the meal and then after the meal in hopes the stomach would expand" and provide an easy way out of this obstacle to increased sales. When docs complained, he recalled, "I told them, ‘Our drug is state of the art. What's more important? You want them to get better or do you want them to stay the same--a thin psychotic patient or a fat stable patient.'"
For the drug companies, Shahrman says, the decision to continue pushing the drug despite side effects is matter of cost benefit analysis: Whether you will make more money by continuing to market the drug for off-label use, and perhaps defending against lawsuits, than you would otherwise. In the case of Zyprexa, in January 2009, Lilly settled a lawsuit brought by with the US Justice Department, agreeing to pay $1.4 billion, including "a criminal fine of $515 million, the largest ever in a health care case, and the largest criminal fine for an individual corporation ever imposed in a United States criminal prosecution of any kind,''the Department of Justice said in announcing the settlement." But Lilly's sale of Zyprexa in that year alone was over $1.8 billion.

Making patients worse

As it turns out, the atypical antipsychotics may not even be the best choice for people with genuine, undisputed psychosis.
A growing number of health professionals have come to think these drugs are not really as effective as older, less expensive medicines which they have replaced, that they themselves produce side effects that cause other sorts of diseases such as diabetes and plunge the patient deeper into the gloomy world of serious mental disorder. Along with stories of success come reports of people turned into virtual zombies.
Elliott reports in Mother Jones: "After another large analysis in The Lancet found that most atypicals actually performed worse than older drugs, two senior British psychiatrists penned a damning editorial that ran in the same issue. Dr. Peter Tyrer, the editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Dr. Tim Kendall of the Royal College of Psychiatrists wrote: "The spurious invention of the atypicals can now be regarded as invention only, cleverly manipulated by the drug industry for marketing purposes and only now being exposed."
Bottom line: Stop Big Pharma and the parasitic shrink community from wantonly pushing these pills across the population.

Antidepressant Linked to Cause Autism When Used by Pregnant Women

A recent article from SFgate.com and other news sources indicates that a recent study published in Archives of General Psychiatry, looked at the possible role of maternal antidepressant use before and during pregnancy. Prenatal Children whose mothers take Prozac, Zolft, or similar SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy are twice as likely as other children to have a diagnosis of autism or similar disorder. The study of 298 autistic children in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California system found a two fold increase in risk of the disorder when mothers took antidepressants at some point in the year before giving birth.
The study doesn't prove that the antidepressants actually caused autism, but it shows that genetics is not the sole reason for autism. Environmental issue can cause autism and antidepressants appear to be a common cause. We hope and expect there will be more studies, but we are not surprised of the results.

"The problem with our 'treatment procedures' is that, unlike standard medical practices, we have no way to verify the true cause of the problem or the effectiveness of our 'solutions'. We have gone from hot/cold baths, to lobotomies, to electric shocks, to psychotropic drugs - with no proof of any kind. If other MDs treated a broken arm the way we treat the human brain they would be in court. And so, more and more, that is where we find ourselves." Dr. Thomas Szasz MD, chair of psychiatry, Syracuse University.

Antidepressants Do Not Work to Treat Autism Either

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved any medications to specifically treat autism, but they have approved three SSRIs sertraline (Zoloft), fluoxetine (Prozac) and fluvoxamine (Luvox) to alleviate certain symptoms of the illness. But research indicated that these antidepressants also provide no benefits.
Another study found that the antidepressant citalopram (Celexa) is not any better than a placebo at alleviating autism symptoms. Additionally researchers concluded that studies of other antidepressants revealed the same results.

Besides not working, these antidepressants often cause major side effects, especially in young people. In the citalopram study, one child participant developed severe seizures from taking the drug. Even after being taken off it, the child continued to have seizures. Other children taking it had a hard time sleeping and concentrating. Hard time concentrating is a symptom of autism, so the study shows the so called alleviate is causing the problem.

It must be devasting for a mother to have an autistic child, but what is worse is the potential prescription of an antidepressant is actually causing the life long problem for the child. The responsibility lies heavily on the pharmaceutical companies that produced these drugs Eli Lilly(prozac), Pfizer(zolft), Solvay(Luvox), GlaxoSmithkline(Paxil), Forest Labs(Celexa). There are class action lawsuit currently by baumhedlundlaw.com, rxbirthdefects.com and others

Stanford Doctors On the Take from BigPharma in Violation of University Policy

Artical By Lisa M. Krieger
MercuryNews Dec. 20, 2010 article

A dozen physicians at Stanford University's School of Medicine are under investigation by the school's disciplinary board for their too-cozy relationships with drug companies.
These physicians delivered speeches paid for by drug companies, in violation of school policy, according to a public database reported by the nonprofit online investigative website ProPublica.
"A review is under way," said Stanford School of Medicine Dean Phil Pizzo, who in 2009 created a policy prohibiting such behavior among the university's 1,500 physicians.
"They now recognize what they did was wrong," he said. "If we find someone who continues to violate policy, we will consider disciplinary action."
Violators include Alan Yeung, Stanford's chief of cardiovascular medicine, who was paid $53,000 from Eli Lilly & Co. to speak at a "Healthcare Professional Education Program" in an appearance that included another $1,463 for travel and a $375 consulting fee. He reportedly quit speaking for the company last fall.
Also named in the ProPublica reporting was child psychiatrist Hans Steiner, now retired, who was paid $109,000 by Eli Lilly to talk about Strattera, a drug that treats attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In a response to the ProPublica report, he said he assumed the policy didn't apply to him once he became an emeritus professor, but he will now comply.
They were among 17,000 doctors nationwide who were paid a total of $257.8
million by seven companies in 2009 and the first two quarters of 2010, according the ProPublica database. In California, about 3,000 doctors received an estimated $28.6 million in payments from pharmaceutical companies for speeches promoting brand-label drugs to fellow doctors, the report said.
"The vast majority (of Stanford faculty) are paying attention to our guidelines," said Pizzo.
The violators have been referred to the senior associate dean for academic affairs at the medical school.
Many Stanford physicians are paid consulting fees by drug companies, which are disclosed to the university and not prohibited, because they improve companies' ability to design and test drugs, ultimately helping human health. For instance, Kiki Chang, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Program, was paid $5,936 to consult for Eli Lilly; oncologist Robert Carlson was paid $4,665 to consult for Pfizer.
The Mercury News tried to contact some Stanford doctors, but calls were not returned by deadline.
The names of doctors moonlighting for drugmakers were private until last year. So far, seven drugmakers have started disclosing payments. All will be required to disclose the information by 2013 as part of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act.
The practice is legal, but it creates the perception of conflict-of-interest because doctors promote certain drugs to peers and get paid by drug companies to do it.
The drug company representatives say the speaking engagements are designed to supply doctors with the most up-to-date information about new drugs, or new data about older drugs, so doctors have a better sense of their effectiveness, interactions and side effects. They also say the practice is designed to better serve patients by educating doctors about illnesses and the drugs available to combat them.
But there is widespread concern that the payments may induce doctors to advocate for the companies' brand-name drugs, rather than lesser-priced generic alternatives.
Stanford's Pizzo first issued guidelines governing physician behavior in 2006, and clarified them in 2009. These policies have been publicized 17 times in the dean's online newsletter.
When alerted to the ProPublica database, Pizzo conducted a preliminary investigation, which suggested that "some individuals "... had understandable reasons for confusion. Others, though, offered explanations why their activities continued that are difficult if not impossible to reconcile with our policy, and here we have concerns," said Pizzo.
"This is unacceptable, certainly for anyone with a Stanford title," he said.
Stanford's medical community is large and diverse, with 1,500 physicians playing different roles, Pizzo said. There are decade-long relationships with drug companies that "don't unravel with the stroke of a pen. They take time."
Moreover, the school must rely on the honor system for compliance. It does not inspect personal tax returns, for instance.
"At the end of the day, we are involved in a trusting relationship with our faculty. And we expect them to be straight and honest with us in their disclosures," said Pizzo. "We count on an honest interpretation by them of what we do."

Love (Sex) and Other Drugs The Movie and Medicaid Fraud

The new movie Love & Other Drugs depics the unethical and illegal marketing activities of BigPharma. It shows mainly how Pfizer and Lilly pharmacuetical agents bribe doctors and medical practices with trips, money, alcohol and orgies all for thier products that don't work. It should be more of an eye opener to the general populace about fraud and pharma drug pushing for increased quotas and pharma agent perks. It is sick to see that Zoloft and Prozac have been marketed just like soup, or telecom services. It is all marketing for shelf space and personal income. This goes along with massive prescriptions by doctors across the US in an ongoing medicaid fraud investigation.

The following is a recent article from Lincoln Journal Star regarding massive prescriptions from doctors in Nebraska
The Cost of Mental Health? Pricey
November 24, 2010
By Mark Andersen
Lincoln Journal Star

Excerpt:
One Lincoln psychiatrist. Six mental health medications prescribed to Medicaid patients over two years. Cost to taxpayers: $2,927,872.
Newspapers around the country have picked up on the lists of Medicaid providers requested last April by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who suggested large numbers should spark official inquiries… In May, state Medicaid Director Vivianne Chaumont reported which Nebraska Medicaid providers wrote the most prescriptions for 11 types of medications during 2008 and 2009. Six of the drugs -- Abilify, Seroquel, Zyprexa, Geodon, Risperdal and Risperidone -- accounted for the bulk of the costs on Nebraska's lists.

Four Lincoln mental health providers were among the top 10 for those six drugs:

* Dr. Walter Duffy, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $2,927,872 (9,010 prescriptions), including more than $1.5 million for Abilify alone.

* Dr. Rafael Tatay, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $1,503,998 (3,998 prescriptions), including $473,700 for Abilify.

* Dr. Stephen Paden, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $587,917 (1,695 prescriptions), including $426,257 for Abilify.

* Dr. Pratap Pothuloori, a Lincoln psychiatrist, $545,487 (1,751 prescriptions), including $192,277 for Abilify.

In a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Grassley cited the example of a Florida doctor who wrote 96,685 prescriptions for mental health drugs in 21 months.

"This trend is found again and again across the states," Grassley wrote, "suggesting that top prescribers stand out not only against other providers in their state, but against the very top prescribers in those states."

Who has the Number One U.S. Ranking in Criminal Fraud Cases? BigPharma of Course

This is a portion of the New York Times article Oct. 2nd 2010 by Duff Wilson “Side Effect may include Lawsuits”.

The new generation of antipsychotics has also become the single biggest target of the False Claims Act, a federal law once largely aimed at fraud among military contractors. Every major company selling the drugs Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson has either settled recent government cases for hundreds of millions of dollars or is currently under investigation for possible health care fraud.
Two of the settlements, involving charges of illegal marketing, set records last year for the largest criminal fines ever imposed on corporations. One involved Eli Lilly’s antipsychotic, Zyprexa; the other involved a guilty plea for Pfizer’s marketing of a pain pill, Bextra. In the Bextra case, the government also charged Pfizer with illegally marketing another antipsychotic, Geodon; Pfizer settled that part of the claim for $301 million, without admitting any wrongdoing.
The companies all say their antipsychotics are safe and effective in treating the conditions for which the Food and Drug Administration has approved them — mostly, schizophrenia and bipolar mania and say they adhere to tight ethical guidelines in sales practices. The drug makers also say that there is a large population of patients who still haven’t taken the drugs but could benefit from them.
AstraZeneca, which markets Seroquel, the top-selling antipsychotic since 2005, says it developed such drugs because they have fewer side effects than older versions.
“It’s a drug that’s been studied in multiple clinical trials in various indications,” says Dr. Howard Hutchinson, AstraZeneca’s chief medical officer. “Getting these patients to be functioning members of society has a tremendous benefit in terms of their overall well-being and how they look at themselves, and to get that benefit, the patients are willing to accept some level of side effects.”
The industry continues to market antipsychotics aggressively, leading analysts to question how drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for about 1 percent of the population have become the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest sellers despite recent crackdowns.

“It’s the money,” says Dr. Jerome L. Avorn, a Harvard medical professor and researcher. “When you’re selling $1 billion a year or more of a drug, it’s very tempting for a company to just ignore the traffic ticket and keep speeding.”

Contentions that the new drugs are superior have been “greatly exaggerated,” says Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia University. Such assertions, he says, “may have been encouraged by an overly expectant community of clinicians and patients eager to believe in the power of new medications.”
“At the same time,” he adds, “the aggressive marketing of these drugs may have contributed to this enhanced perception of their effectiveness in the absence of empirical evidence.”
Others agree. “They sold the story they’re more safe, when they aren’t,” says Robert Whitaker, a journalist who has written two books about psychiatric medicines. “They had to cover up the problems. Right from the start, we got this false story.” End of NYTimes exerpt.

The antidepressant pharmaceutical industry takes in $14.6 Billion in revenue selling these drugs that don’t work. If a firm is taking in this type of money it is easy to settle multi-million dollar fraud lawsuits. The media, government, and medical industry are all working together to cover up the facts that antidepressants don’t work at all so the public is just dumbed down and uninformed on the subject. We commend the NYTimes for doing the research for this article. A truely ethical and independent FDA could stop this madness.

DOJ Targets Pharmaceutical Companies Globally in Corruption Probe

Financial Times FT.com
By Stephanie Kirchgaessner
August 12, 2010

The US Department of Justice is scrutinising payments by leading pharmaceuticals companies for hospitality, consultants, licensing agreements and charitable donations in markets around the world as part of a wide-ranging corruption probe.

GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, among others, have disclosed being contacted by the DoJ and Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the investigation. Merck, the US drugs group, announced last week that it had also been contacted and was co-operating with investigators.

An industry attorney familiar with the probe said that the DoJ was looking at whether pharma companies had ignored a “systematic risk” inherent in the global drugs business and ignored obligations under local and US anti-bribery law.

The highly regulated nature of the business, combined with the fact that healthcare officials in many non-US markets were government funded, made the industry a natural target for such a probe, the person added.

The investigation is at a relatively early stage but is considered a priority for the DoJ.

While hospitality – including meals and all expenses-paid travel for conferences – has long been considered a potential risk for pharma groups, the DoJ’s probe is looking at all aspects of companies’ dealings in non-US markets, people familiar with the matter say. That includes the recruitment of physicians for clinical trials. In some markets, the same physicians may serve on regulatory boards that approve or deny drugs.

The DoJ declined to comment. But last November, Lanny Breuer, head of the DoJ’s criminal division, announced that investigators would be focusing on international corruption in the pharmaceuticals industry for “years”.

Mr Breuer warned a conference of pharmaceutical industry lawyers that prosecutors were gearing up for an investigation of international corruption in the sector. The drugs companies took notice.

That threat has now become a reality. Merck, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Baxter, SciClone, and Bristol-Myers Squibb have in recent months received inquiries from the DoJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with an industry-wide bribery ­investigation.

GlaxoSmithKline, the UK drugmaker, told the Financial Times on Thursday that it too had received “inquiries” from US authorities, but that it disclosed the issue “reactively” only to selected reporters in April.

Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical group, said in February that it had voluntarily provided the DoJ and SEC with information concerning potentially improper payments outside the US and was exploring resolution of the matter.

There is perhaps no industry that is as vulnerable to violations of US anti-bribery laws as the pharmaceutical industry. In markets round the world, the companies deal, sometimes thousands of times in a single day, with doctors, clinicians, hospital operators and regulators who are considered under US law to be government officials, because they are employed by state-owned facilities.

Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the US anti-bribery law, companies may not offer items of value to foreign government officials for profit. One industry lawyer involved in the matter said global pharmaceutical companies operating in countries with state-run medical institutions deal with government officials at every turn of their business: whether it is seeking the go-ahead for a manufacturing site; obtaining drug licences; conducting clinical trials; importing drugs; selling and marketing drugs to physicians; or getting a product on to a hospital’s approved list.

“What most companies will find is that all of these areas are risky and, if they don’t train and educate their people, they are going to find themselves with issues. For example, if you have hired customs brokers, how do you know they aren’t bribing officials?” the attorney said.

According to the law firm Arnold & Porter, the DoJ is particularly interested in corrupt payments that may have influenced the reliability or integrity of data in clinical trials performed outside the US. A recent report by the Department of Health and Human Services found 80 per cent of marketing applications for drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the US had relied on at least one foreign trial.

“Companies may find themselves facing critical legal issues if approval of products rested on the results of studies the DoJ deems corrupt,” Arnold & Porter said in an advisory letter to clients last month.

A person familiar with the investigation confirmed that clinical trials were one of several areas the DoJ was examining.

Alexandra Wrage, the president of Trace, a non-profit organisation that helps companies establish anti-corruption practices, said that alleged wrong­doing at pharmaceutical companies could often centre on inappropriately lavish hospitality, such as wining and dining doctors from state-run hospitals at conferences in Bali or Monaco.

Copy and paste link here (free FT.com Reg.):http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9a8e8f90-a63e-11df-8767-00144feabdc0.html

BigPharma’s Deceptive Plan to Include Everyone as a Antidepressant Candidate-Our Case study is Cymbalta by Eli Lilly

Firstly you need to know that Pharmaceutical company’s assessment is only a theory. They have no idea what causes depression. They have no scientific study or evidence that drugging someone will alleviate depression. Cymbalta (duloxetine HCl) is FDA approved for depression and also for general anxiety disorder and management of diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain and fibromyalgia. This is from a Cymbalta Ad “There are many theories about the cause of depression. One common theory is that depression is caused by an imbalance of naturally occurring substances in the brain and spinal cord”.
(that is correct it is FDA approved drug based on a theory).

A typical Ad for Cymbalta try’s to include anyone with any malady as a possible effect of depression. Here is a synopsis of how Cymbalta categorizes depression.
Major depressive disorder "depression" is a serious medical condition with a variety of symptoms (they are trying to generalize). Emotional symptoms can include sadness, loss of interest in things you once enjoyed, feelings of guilt or worthlessness, restlessness, and trouble concentrating or making decisions (this can include virtually anyone). Physical symptoms can include fatigue, lack of energy, and changes in weight (all humans) or sleep patterns (again any active person can get fatigued and lack energy). Additional symptoms of depression may include vague aches and pains (vague pains come on be serious, again generalizing), irritability, anxiety, and thoughts of death or suicide. Suicide is a known risk of depression and some other psychiatric disorders. (Here they indicate thoughts of suicide is a sign of depression, and also taking their drugs can cause suicide)
People with a family history of depression (They don’t know the cause or depressions but here they indicate depression can be genetic) may be more likely to get the disease, but anyone (including everyone here) can become depressed. Sometimes the triggers are external — for example, relationship troubles or financial problems (the planet is in a recession, that’s everyone here). At other times the disease may begin with physical illness or hormonal shifts (a normal woman’s hormonal change is depression according to Eli Lilly, how did the human race evolve). Depression also may occur without any identifiable trigger at all. (they admit here again they don’t know the cause)
The point we are trying to make is pharmaceutical companies in this case Eli Lilly-drug Cymbalta describes everyone as a candidate for their drug. Their entire plan is to put the human race on an antidepressant. Yet they have no scientific evidence for the cause of depression. Does that sound like a good plan for the human race? A placebo has been found to be as effective as antidepressants. Research the studies for yourself. In addition their drug can give children and young adults suicidal thoughts and actions.

Doctors on the Take

Bigpharma is after big money, and they fund millions in grants to academia to do research and development of their drugs. Well do they pay your doctor too? There are a number of states and the District of Columbia which have disclosure laws for payments from drug companies to doctors. Those states are Minnesota, Vermont, West Virginia and Maine. A report by the New York Times "Psychiatrists earn more money from drug makers than doctors in any other specialty. For instance, the more psychiatrists have earned from drug makers, the more they have prescribed a new class of powerful medicines known as atypical anti-psychotics to children, for whom the drugs are especially risky and mostly unapproved." – From New York Times, June 27, 2007, Psychiatrists Top List in Drug Maker Gifts

A recent report by the Orlando Sentinel, Beginning in 2009, Eli Lilly will disclose payments of more than $500 to doctors for their roles as advisers and for speaking at educational seminars. In the future years, the company indicates they will expand the types of payments disclosed to include such things as travel, entertainment and gifts. Eli Lilly doesn’t intend to report payments in 2008 or earlier. A number of states were considering that drug companies should report payments and gift from $25 and above, but many drug companies were reluctant to comply. It is feared that Eli Lilly and other drug companies will still not comply with the compensation disclosure guidelines. There appears to be no government department willing or able to enforce it. This could be an attempt to prevent state and federal legislators to not pass a bill. Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical companies can simply say they we are monitoring themselves. I believe they call that the fox minding the hen house. Supplying doctors with meals, hotels and travel expenses will not be part of this disclosure. It will be simply fees paid for speaking events and advisory roles.

Drug maker Schering-Plough, one of the largest drug companies in the world, has been outright bribing physicians to prescribe drugs and operate sham clinical trials. The doctors were paid” consulting fees” if the physician avoids using a competing drug. Doctors who prescribed the drug company's products and avoided competing drugs were paid "consulting fees" of tens of thousands of dollars. There was no real consulting, it just a fee paid to doctors to prescribe that companies drug. You the patient are getting scammed. What can you do about it? Well you can ask your doctor if they get paid to prescribe certain drugs for certain companies. Patients needs to be proactive in their care, and not be shy about why they of there child is being prescribed any drug.

Yesterday Tobacco companies were under scrutiny for their despicable practices, today its Banks and Wall Street who are under review for creating the current recession mess, and tomorrow maybe someone your government will look at BigPharma and their crimes to humanity. Someone has to report it since your media will not. There is a suitable book on this subject called On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health -by Jerome Kassirer