More Than 20 Percent Of American Adults Now On Psychiatric Drugs For Behavioral Problems

November 30, 2011

Natural News

By Jonathan Benson

“Psychiatric drugs do NOT help. In the long run, they make things much worse. Just ask Dr. Peter Breggin – a psychiatrist with more than 40 years of experience. He is convinced drugs are never the answer.

Prescription drug addiction is a very serious problem in the US, and is typified in part by the more than 20 percent of American adults that are now hooked on pharmaceuticals for conditions like anxiety and depression. A new study conducted by Medco Health Solutions Inc., a pharmacy benefits management company, has found that one in five adults — and one in four women — now regularly takes at least one drug for psychiatric or behavioral disorders.

The findings, which are based on data compiled of 2.5 million patients, found that the use of behavioral drugs among adults has skyrocketed by 22 percent since 2001. The majority of adults taking behavioral drugs are still women aged 45 years or older, but many men are now taking them as well — and based on current trends, such drug use in general is expected to continue to increase.

It used to be that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drugs like Ritalin, Dexedrine, and Adderall were prescribed primarily to young children. But now middle-aged adults are apparently a primary target as well, as the use of both ADHD and antipsychotic drugs among 20- to 44-year-olds has more than tripled within the past decade.

More women than men currently take drugs for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which include Zyprexa, Risperdal, and Abilify. But the use of these drugs among men has risen fourfold within the past ten years. On the flip side, prescriptions for ADHD drugs, which have typically been more popular among males, have risen by 250 percent among females since 2001.

Click here for the full report.

Ten-Year-Old Boy Hangs Himself After Taking Ritalin and Prozac

July 20th, 2011

Natural News

By: Anthony Gucciardi

A ten-year-old boy hung himself with a belt from his bunk bed while taking a psychotropic combination of Ritalin and Prozac. The boy’s father says that the two drugs are entirely to blame for the death of his son, whose boisterous behavior and low spirits led to a psychiatrist’s suggestion to begin taking them. At the time of death, the child had more drugs in his body than the ‘normal’ level for adults suffering from the same psychological issues.

About 661,000 prescriptions are prescribed each year in Britain alone to treat childhood ADHD — twice the figure of five years ago. These medications are also being given to extremely young children, one such child just 15 months of age. The doctors prescribing these pharmaceuticals for such young children are going against the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) official guidelines, which prohibits their use for children under the age of 6. Educational psychologist David Traxson suspects that the number of extremely young children on Ritalin or similar drugs is quite high and that it is steadily climbing.

‘These young children are taking powerful, potentially addictive drugs and no one knows what will happen to their brains in the future,’ he warned.

Ritalin stimulates the nervous system, which leads to a number of admitted side effects including increased blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature and alertness and suppressed appetite. These side effects, however, are very minor compared to research that has linked Ritalin use to cancer and an increased probability of suicidal thoughts and behavior. The very pharmaceutical that is designed to help suicidal patients may very well lead to suicide. In addition, Ritalin is an extremely powerful pill that can be compared to illegal hard drugs. In fact, Ritalin has the same pharmacological profile as cocaine, and it is even more potent. Scientists using brain imaging equipment found that Ritalin in pill form occupies more of the neural transporters responsible for the “high” experienced by addicts than cocaine that is smoked or injected.

Considering the hardcore nature of this drug, one would assume that the diagnosis protocol for ADHD is quite vigorous and thorough. The sad truth is that diagnosing ADHD comes down to a matter of opinion. Due to the loose regulation of ADHD diagnosis and distribution of Ritalin and other drugs, 1 in 10 kids have been diagnosed with ADHD. Studies have found that food dyes may be to blame for the behavior observed in children that are labeled as ADHD by doctors. Such additives include: blue #1 and #2 food coloring, green #3, orange B, red #3 and #40, yellow #5-6, and sodium benzoate.

The sad death of this ten-year-old boy may be directly related to his prescription medication, Ritalin. The child’s healthcare provider should have tried to improve diet by eliminating harmful food additives and preservatives, which have been linked to ADHD, before resulting to harmful pharmaceutical drugs that have been linked to suicidal tendencies.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Jon Rappoport – NoMoreFakeNews.com

Click the picture or link below to hear Kevin’s interview with investigative reporter,  Jon Rappoport, and click here to purchase his new, extended e-book version of The Ownership to All Life.

Jon Rappoport on The Kevin Trudeau Show 04/12/11

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 4-12-11

Today, Kevin welcomes investigative reporter, Jon Rappoport of NoMoreFakeNews.com, to the show. Find out how the government is using genetic research to redesign the human being and how Big Pharma searches the market to create and twist normal human tendencies into new diseases.

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Ten Percent of American Kids Have ADHD

November 15th, 2010

AOL News

By: David Knowles

It’s a problem that appears to be getting worse.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD for short, is on the rise in the United States, with one in 10 children in the country being diagnosed with the neurological condition at some point, according to figures released by the Centers for Disease Control.

The National Survey of Children’s Health found that the number of kids age 4 to 17 who reported being diagnosed with ADHD rose from 7.8 percent to 9.5 percent from 2003 to 2007.

The disorder is characterized by an inability to concentrate at school, at home or in social settings. According to the survey, 66.3 percent of children who suffer from ADHD take medication to combat its symptoms, a marked increase from previous years.

Medications such as Ritalin, Adderall and Concerta, all of them amphetamines, are used to treat the symptoms of ADHD. Some doctors have even prescribed medical marijuana to patients.

The precise cause of ADHD remains unknown, but one recent study suggested a correlation with a diet high in processed and fried foods.

Here’s a primer on ADHD from AnswersTV.

Americans Drowning In Prescription Drugs

September 4th, 2010

Natural News

By: Mike Adams

Nearly half of all Americans now use prescription drugs on a regular basis according to a CDC report that was just released (1). Nearly a third of Americans use two or more drugs, and more than one in ten use five or more prescription drugs regularly.

The report also revealed that one in five children are being regularly given prescription drugs, and nine out of ten seniors are on drugs.

All these drugs came at a cost of over $234 billion in 2008. The most commonly-used drugs were:

• Statin drugs for older people
• Asthma drugs for children
• Antidepressants for middle-aged people
• Amphetamine stimulants for children

America has become a nation of druggies. The seniors are being drugged for nearly every symptom a doctor can find, children are being doped up with (legalized) speed, and middle-aged soccer moms are popping suicide pills (antidepressants).

Prescription drug addictions are on the rise, too. Prescription drugs are so dangerous that now even the DEA is hosting “take back your pills” day allowing citizens to anonymously surrender their unused prescription painkillers to DEA agents.

Interestingly, DEA agents will only accept “legal” amphetamine drugs such as Ritalin but not “illegal” methamphetamine drugs. You’re only off the hook if you paid monopoly prescription prices for your drugs.

And it’s only going to get worse
The percentage of Americans taking prescription drugs is expected to rise even further as the health reform insurance regulations kick in. Much of the bill was specifically designed to favor pharmaceutical industry interests by putting even more people on medication. Expect to see more “screening” too — a thinly disguised drug recruitment method that primarily seeks to ensnare new patients in a high-profit drug regimen.

The mass medication of American citizens has reached a disturbing tipping point where the future of the nation itself is at risk. That’s because pharmaceuticals cause cognitive decline, and once you get to the point where over 50 percent of the voters can’t think straight, you’re trapped in a crumbling Democracy.

And that doesn’t even take into consideration the financial cost of America’s addiction to drugs: With nearly one out of every five dollars out of the entire U.S. economy now being spent on sickness and disease, America finds herself stuck in a cycle of high-cost drug treatments that cure no one.

That’s right: No one gets healthier from taking prescription drugs. They don’t cure anyone and they don’t prevent disease. They only maintain patients in a kind of “pre-death stasis” where they’re alive just enough to keep buying more medication. Drug companies don’t want you dead because that would cut off their profits. But they don’t want you healthy, either, because then they wouldn’t have you as a customer. So their drugs are actually designed to keep you in a state of ongoing disease without curing your condition but also without killing you outright.

You sort of chemically limp along, shelling out dollars while your memory fades and your skin starts to show signs of severe toxicity. Big Pharma is not merely sapping the life out of you; it’s also draining you financially.

Isn’t it obvious that pharmaceuticals don’t work?
If pharmaceuticals really worked to make people healthy, then the half of America currently taking pharmaceuticals would be the healthiest half, and the people who don’t take pharmaceuticals would be unhealthy, right?

But in fact it’s the other way around: People who take pharmaceuticals remain unhealthy and really never get cured of anything. Meanwhile, those who avoid taking pharmaceuticals are, by and large, far healthier individuals.

If America were running a grand experiment to determine whether pharmaceuticals really work — and trust me, the country really is running precisely that experiment — any reasonable observer would have to conclude that pharmaceuticals really don’t improve the health of those who take them. The more pharmaceuticals you take, in fact, the sicker you will become. That’s because drugs cause an imbalance in the body that soon leads to the emergence of other side effects.

At the same time, many of the drugs people take actually cause the very things they claim to prevent. Osteoporosis drugs cause hip fractures. Cancer drugs cause cancer. Antidepressants cause suicidal thoughts. The list goes on and on.

The people who are really, truly healthy in America are those who avoid pharmaceuticals.  They take care of their own health through regular exercise, time in nature, sensible sunshine exposure and healthy eating. They distrust the pharmaceutical industry and they don’t let television advertising hypnotize them into making poor decisions like getting a flu shot.

Yet even though it is blatantly obvious that pharmaceuticals really don’t work to improve the health of any population, the drug industry insists the only thing wrong with America’s health is that not enough people are taking medication!

If we could only get 100% of the population on drugs instead of 50%, they seem to be saying, then we’d all be healthy!

The logic is absurd, of course. And that goal has nothing to do with actual health but everything to do with increasing drug company profits. While drug companies may not know much at all about health, they do know one thing: How to commit marketing fraud by making outrageous benefit claims for their drugs while whitewashing the very real dangerous side effects.

Big Pharma will bankrupt America
Mark my words: Big Pharma will bankrupt America. And quite possibly the UK as well. Any nation that hands over its health care system to the drug industry is committing financial suicide.

That’s because Big Pharma absolutely will not halt its single-minded mission to extract as much money as possible from the population, corporations and governments. It will do anything and everything it can to accomplish this goal: Bribe researchers to commit research fraud, engage in false and fraudulent marketing, lie to the public, hide negative study results, conduct experiments on children in third-world countries, pollute the planet with drug factory runoff, influence legislators with campaign finance contributions, dominate the pages of medical journals with false and misleading advertising, submit “scientific” articles to the journals ghost-written by the drug companies themselves… this list never ends.

Drug companies will knowingly keep dangerous drugs on the market that kill tens of thousands of people. They will knowingly withhold research from the FDA if it might make their drugs look bad. They will knowingly distort clinical trial data to eliminate whatever outcome they don’t want to see.

This is all “routine” in the drug industry. These aren’t exceptions, mind you: They are the way the drug industry operates on a daily basis.

The worst part of it is that Big Government is now fully in bed with Big Pharma. I already exposed Sen Harry Reid’s efforts to swing a sweet deal for Big Pharma in the recent health care reforms. The FDA’s collusion with drug companies, meanwhile, is legendary: There is hardly a decision made by the FDA that doesn’t in some way protect drug company profits.

The med schools and science journals have been overrun by drug company influence. Drug companies are so large and powerful now that the U.S. government considers them “too big to nail.” When Pfizer was recently found guilty of felony crimes, the government allowed it to create a shell company to take the hit so that Pfizer itself could remain in business and keep selling drugs to the government.

A federal prosecutor actually went on the record saying, “If we prosecute Pfizer… a lot of people who work for the company who haven’t engaged in criminal activity would get hurt.”

Therefore, the logic goes, they have to let Pfizer off the hook.

And so it goes; Big Government protecting the criminals in the drug industry, making excuses for looking the other way when scientific fraud and marketing fraud is routinely being carried out right under their noses. The Dept of Justice isn’t even interested in taking down criminal drug companies!

How this will end
So where does this medication madness ever end? It will end, I predict, with the economic downfall of the United States of America. When the nation is too broke, too medicated and too chemically compromised to stay afloat, it will suffer an enormous economic collapse.

Following the financial failure of big government, Big Pharma will implode virtually overnight. Without the government buying its products, Big Pharma will find few willing private customers. Ordinary people will seek out affordable and safer natural remedies, and the drug industry will collapse to perhaps 10% of its current size.

This will be a great day for the health of all Americans who have suffered under the chemical assault of Big Pharma. To live without the daily onslaught of Big Pharma’s chemicals is to live a healthier life with improved brain function and awareness. Once people get off all their drugs, we might have hope to thoughtfully rebuild a nation based on nutrition rather than monopoly-priced medications.

I’ve said this at least a hundred times, and I’ll say it again: No nation that ignores the nutritional health of its citizens has any real future. A successful long-term society MUST, at its core, invest in real nutrition and the holistic health education of its citizens. Without good nutrition, every society is ultimately doomed to fail.

Modern medicine, in other words, is destroying our country. And the “cure” for this disease is to throw out what doesn’t work (pharmaceuticals) and start embracing the things that do work (nutrition and superfoods) to keep people healthy.

Click here for the full report from Natural News

Norman Human Problems Spiking Healthcare Costs

May 28, 2010

Natural News

By Sherry Baker

(NaturalNews) Mainstream medicine has a huge new growth industry underway — the “medicalization” of the human condition. That’s the conclusion of a study headed by Brandeis University sociologist Peter Conrad that was just published in the journal Social Science and Medicine. The report, the first study of its kind, documents that over the last several decades, numerous common problems — many of which are simply due to being human — have been newly defined as medical disorders that supposedly need prescription drugs and other costly treatments.

For example, menopause is a perfectly natural part of womanhood but it is now considered a “condition” complete with symptoms that physicians often believe need treatment with hormones and anti-depressants. Likewise, normal pregnancies, taking longer-than-average time to get pregnant and impotence (now known by the medical term “erectile dysfunction”) are all now seen as medical conditions that may need intense medical monitoring and treatment. And if a child fidgets in class — bingo! He or she is frequently classified as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and quickly placed on stimulant drugs like Ritalin

Click here for the full report.

Ritalin Side Effects can Include Sudden Death

November 20, 2009

Examiner

By Etta Brown

After years of speculation and rare case reports, a recent FDA-funded study by The National Institute of Mental Health claims that drugs such as Ritalin – widely used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder in children – increase the risk of sudden death by five hundred percent among children and teens.

“Drugs are not the answer,” said Etta Brown, a licensed educational psychologist, veteran social worker and author of Learning Disabilities, Understanding the Problem and Managing the Challenges from Langdon Street Press. “Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are quick to tell parents there is a pill that will fix their kids, but it’s a false bill of goods. In many cases, these drugs – like Ritalin – will serve only to dull their kids’ senses and create health risks the parents could never have imagined.”

The irony of Ritalin, Brown added, is that it actually damages the neural connections needed for learning. While it may calm a hyper-active child, so that he is less of a problem in the classroom, it does not create the ability to learn.

“Another well-documented side effect of Ritalin is that it may cause a permanent tic of the face, head and neck,” Brown said. “There is a long fifty-year history of false advertising by drug companies that sell drugs with known side effects that are more damaging to the developing nervous system of children than the condition they are designed to treat.”

Between two to18 percent of American children are thought to be affected by ADHD, and Ritalin remains one of the most prescribed drugs for the behavioral disorder. This suggests that the medical approach to poorly nourished children who aren’t getting enough exercise is to dose them with a drug that is known to interfere with the development of their brains, cause permanent tics of the face, head and neck, and increase the likelihood of sudden death by 500 percent. And the FDA is not looking.

Click here for the full report

Abuse of ADHD Drugs on the Rise

August 24, 2009

Health Day News

As more and more prescriptions are being written for medications to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), more and more children are abusing these drugs.

That’s the conclusion of new research in the September issue of Pediatrics that found the rate of ADHD medication abuse was up 76 percent from 1998 to 2005, and at the same time, the rates of prescriptions for these medications rose about 80 percent.

“We looked at all the poison control centers across the nation and found a significant increase in the number of calls for ADHD medication abuse that parallels the amount of prescriptions being written,” said Dr. Jennifer Setlik, an emergency physician at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Ohio and a study author.

What’s more, Setlik said, is that this study is “not an estimate of the total problem” because it looks only at data from poison control centers, but it gives doctors and parents a snapshot of the trend toward rising abuse of these medications with increasing availability.

ADHD affects between 8 percent and 12 percent of children, and as many as 4 percent of adults worldwide, according to background information in the study. The disorder is commonly treated with stimulant medications, which have a seemingly paradoxical effect on people with ADHD, allowing them to concentrate and function more effectively. The drugs most often prescribed are mixed amphetamine salts (Adderall) and methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta), according to the study.

The study also reports that next to marijuana, prescription medications are the most common drugs that teenagers use to get high. This may be because teens believe these medications are safe because they’ve been prescribed by a doctor, or simply because of their availability.

To assess whether increased availability of ADHD medications would also cause a rise in the number of teens abusing the drugs, Setlik and her colleagues reviewed data from the National Poison Data System, which includes information from poison control centers across the United States.

The researchers looked for cases of intentional abuse or misuse of ADHD medications in youths 13 to 19 years old from 1998 through 2005.

They found that over the eight-year study period, the number of calls to poison control centers regarding ADHD medication use went up 76 percent, from 330 calls during the first year to 581 calls the last year.

At the same time, overall ADHD prescriptions increased by 80 percent for all children and teens, and about 86 percent for kids between 10 and 19 years old.

The data didn’t include information about whether a teen abusing an ADHD medication was the one who had been prescribed the drug or whether the abuser was a teen without ADHD who was taking the medications.

Parents “need to be aware of the potential for the abuse of these medications for teens that have and haven’t been prescribed them,” Setlik said.

If a child is taking ADHD medication, she recommended keeping an eye on the amount the child is using.

Tom Hedrick, one of the founding members of The Partnership for a Drug-Free America, agreed that parents need to monitor any prescription medications their children use to make sure that they’re being used properly. He also advised parents to safeguard their own prescriptions.

But what’s critical, he said, is letting your kids know that taking drugs that weren’t prescribed for them, or taking more than what was prescribed is not OK.

“We have to start thinking proactively instead of reactively,” said Hedrick. “Fifty percent of kids report never hearing a single word about prescription drug abuse, but these drugs are just as dangerous, just as addictive and just as deadly as illicit drugs.”

“Right now, parents may feel a sense of relief that their kids are taking medicines and not street drugs,” he said. “But what we really have is the perfect storm because there’s a lack of awareness and an ease of availability.”

Click here for the full report from Atlanta Journal Constitution

ADHD Drugs Proven Absolutely Useless for Children – Plus, They Stunt Growth

July 10, 2009

Natural News

by David Gutierrez

Stimulant drugs such as Ritalin provide no long-term benefit in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the latest findings of the ongoing Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA), published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

According to previous analysis of MTA data, stimulant drugs do improve the social functioning and reduce symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity in children with ADHD for the first year of treatment. In the current analysis, however, researchers followed 485 children for eight years and found that children who remained on medication for that entire time showed no improvement in symptoms over those who had stopped taking the drugs.

“If you put a child on medication, he or she is far better right at that time. The question for parents is: Is this going to make a benefit for my child long term?” said researcher William Pelham, of the University of Buffalo. “The answer is no. Behavioral treatments are going to have much better benefit in the long term.”

Another analysis of MTA data, published in the same journal, found that use of ADHD drugs appeared to stunt children’s growth. Children who had never taken stimulant drugs were an average of six pounds heavier and 0.75 inches taller than children of the same age who had taken the drugs for three years. This height and weight difference was permanent.

According to Pelham, behavioral treatments for ADHD can be harder to find than drugs, and often insurers will not cover them. Nevertheless, such treatments are available and have been proven to work without the side effect risk of pharmaceuticals.

“It’s wrong for a doctor to say to a parent, this treatment is harder to find, so instead we’re going to put your child on a drug that will have no long-term benefit,” he said.

Click here for the full story on NaturalNews.com