"I trusted the doctors, I trusted the FDA … and I feel betrayed by both," says Erin Evans, the mother of Rex who was prescribed the ‘atypical’ antipsychotic, Risperdal (risperidone) at age 8.
When the Times refers to an experiment as "bold and controversial" the reporter is sanitizing the fact that the experiment is UNETHICAL—it violates medicine’s cardinal rule "First, do no harm."
SAMHSA Director: “The New Freedom Commission (NFC) report is not official Bush Administration policy, but rather the unofficial recommendations of an appointed commission.”
"Virtually every major scientific and medical journal has been humbled recently by publishing findings that are later discredited." NYT
The New York Times reports that former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Lester Crawford "is under criminalo investigation by a federal grand jury over accusations of financial improprieties and false statements to Congress."
Under the influence of pharmaceutical companies, physicians anhd drug companies engage in "disease mongering." Below is a critique of Dr. David Healy’s essay: Dr. Nassir Ghaemi who argues for the legitimacy of bipolar diagnosis.
Bbioethicists are seizing the opportunity to expand their own marketability. The UK publication, NATURE, reports about the latest bioethics gimmick that has sprung up in California– ‘dial-an-ethicist’—at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.
A BBC documentary that airs Thursday, April 27 exposes the disregard for the welfare of patients exploited by US pharmaceutical companies that outsource their clinical drug trials to India, the drug industry’s current favorite drug testing laboratory.
The answer given by Dr. Joseph Britto, a pediatric intensive care physician, hits the nail on the head: "Unlike pilots, doctors don’t go down with their planes."
In the U.S. the two populations at greatest risk of inappropriate, coercive, dangerous prescribing of highly toxic psychotropic drugs as chemical
restraints are the elderly and children.
"Corruption in any one of the critical decision points in the pharmaceutical system can be detrimental to a country’s ability to improve the health of its population." [World Banki]
“More than a year after the Food and Drug Administration announced it had strengthened its drug safety system, the agency still lacks a reliable system for keeping track of emerging problems, congressional investigators concluded in a report to be released today.” [Los Angeles Times, below]
