FitChick Posted February 17, 2012 Share Posted February 17, 2012 Psychiatrists and Big Pharma are trying to keep the money flowing by creating new "disorders" that need treating with drugs. Finally some British doctors have spoken out with this interesting article. So many people these days, instead of learning useful coping skills, think any unpleasant emotion needs to be suppressed with a pill. Link to post Share on other sites
denise_xo Posted February 17, 2012 Share Posted February 17, 2012 I agree with the gist of the article. I don't think the following is realistic, though "For those who are grieving, doctors would do better to offer time, compassion, remembrance, and empathy, than pills." That's really the job of family and friends, IMO, rather than doctors. I also don't think pills and more 'natural' coping strategies are mutually exclusive. When I have been on anti depressants, the main thing it has facilitated for me is to get me into a state where I can actively and constructively work on my issues. So for me, one has supported and facilitated the other. Link to post Share on other sites
Feelin Frisky Posted February 17, 2012 Share Posted February 17, 2012 I thoroughly disagree with the OP's last sentence. That is not the dynamic. Pharmaceutical companies are getting better at refining the means to right issues in neurotransmitter efficiencies. Simple. This gives real people better means to treat the causes of behavioral and emotional maladies without having to suppress the symptoms with a sedative or anti-psychotic "pill". It's good medicine, not bad. It's just being misinterpreted through bad biases. The only thing I'd change is that diagnosis of disorders be made in concert with sleep analysis because failure to sleep or get the right kind of deep delta wave sleep states often manifests as symptoms of mental illness or emotional, cognitive or behavioral dysfunction. In this light, the issue could be physiology and not a subjective "mental illness" or other labelling notion. Pharma in America has to pass many tests to get FDA approval and they don't get that approval for frivolous treatment of "invented disorders". They get it for achieving a safe model of improving neurotransmitter efficiency. Link to post Share on other sites
Author FitChick Posted February 18, 2012 Author Share Posted February 18, 2012 (edited) Most depression and anxiety can be alleviated with proper nutrition and exercise. Lifestyle changes. Most people and doctors are too lazy. Doctors need lots of bodies coming in and out so they can make money. The FDA is a joke. I guess some people have missed all the alerts over the years as FDA approved drugs have killed people and been withdrawn from the market. Read a wonderful book written by a doctor, Overdo$ed America. Doctors, scientists and researchers can and have been bought off. Edited February 18, 2012 by FitChick Link to post Share on other sites
johan Posted February 18, 2012 Share Posted February 18, 2012 I don't necessarily think it's the doctors who are lazy. They can't come live your life for you. If it's true that diet, lifestyle, etc. can make the difference, most people wouldn't make those changes anyway. If a pill can fix it instead, that's what they would choose. Link to post Share on other sites
Feelin Frisky Posted February 18, 2012 Share Posted February 18, 2012 Most depression and anxiety can be alleviated with proper nutrition and exercise. Lifestyle changes. Most people and doctors are too lazy. Doctors need lots of bodies coming in and out so they can make money. The FDA is a joke. I guess some people have missed all the alerts over the years as FDA approved drugs have killed people and been withdrawn from the market. Read a wonderful book written by a doctor, Overdo$ed America. Doctors, scientists and researchers can and have been bought off. This is misinformation based upon bias that is actually dangerous. It propagates fear of treatment based upon you "beliefs". Nutrition and exercise surely help a lot of people but you have no expertise that you demonstrate to say that you know anything about the physiology that today's medications address which if taken correctly are helping millions of people make changes they simply can not because they have inefficiencies in the neurotransmitter systems. I just spent quite some time explaining to jen r on her thread about anxiety and her resistance to medication based upon a similar kind of bias you imply that medicine is just automatically "bad" and unnecessary. I painstakingly repeated that anxiety is often the result of low production of gaba-amino butyric acid which the brain needs to move the products and by-products of cellular biology through the nerve cells and that the prescription of the non-addicting and transparent medication called "gabapentin" implies that her doctor assumes this is the case. Yet, you, unafficted by the same condition can over-rule this science and state that this can be fixed by nutrition and exercise. If you can't compose yourself to even work anymore and have impaired sleep because of this sick physiology of the brain, what makes anyone think the person can just ignore the intense feelings of panic and anxiety and just up and exercise the problem away? That is misinforming someone based upon a notion reflecting a bias. Many millions of people have all manner of neurotransmitter imbalances and electrochemical misfiring analogous to an automobile's ignition timing being out of sync with the compression of mixed gas and air. They may be able to effect that by diet and exercise but they also happen to be suffering from conditions which put many of them in the hospital, the suicide ward or morgue, or jail from acting out criminally or psychotically. They can all work on diet and exercise AFTER they get their chemistry levels tuned to allow them to stop "feeling" such intense symptoms and stop the chemically-imposed cycles of repetition of compulsions to repeat the thinking patterns that contribute to their malady. You really ought to learn something more about the truth that medicine changed drastically with the introduction of the serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) class of medications the most famous of which is Prozac from the older model of simply tamping down the systems with a central nervous system depressant or, in some folks, speeding up the central nervous system with a stimulant which in some people counter-intuitively calms them down (Ritalin, Adderall). These are with potions or pharmacology contrivances to make money. If they are an FDA approved medicine, they have gotten their funding and their approval by communicating a "modelled approach" to impacting the physiology of psychological diseases and maladies. If you're fit and untroubled, you should not be patting yourself on the back for having the chemistry that allows you to be that way while implying that what others suffer is their laziness. That is frankly foolish and unhelpful to other people. Link to post Share on other sites
Feelin Frisky Posted February 18, 2012 Share Posted February 18, 2012 double post due to system glitch Link to post Share on other sites
Author FitChick Posted February 18, 2012 Author Share Posted February 18, 2012 With your knowledge, you would get a lot more out of reading Overdosed America than most people. You can find a used copy for cheap at amazon.com. Here is the doctor's website with lots of current information as well. Enjoy! Link to post Share on other sites
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