Truthman speaks out against GlaxoSmithKline

Truthman speaks out here against nefarious practices by GlaxoSmithKline, the drug company. He writes about the illegal marketing of depression drug Wellbutrin as a weight-loss aid, and the tragedies caused by SSRI anti-depressants, including Prozac, Seroxat, Citalopram and Zyprexa, because of their grave side-effects. If you ever think of taking any of this pharmaceutical junk yourself, I urge you to ponder Truthman's words and the words of Dr David Healy, an expert on SSRI drugs, and think again. Improving your nutrition is far more likely to lessen depression than any pharmaceutical mind-altering drugs. Can you really trust GSK or other drug companies with the safety of your brain/mind when you read of their iniquitous behaviour? - Your brain is not infinitely elastic. Guard it from assault by psychotropic drugs.

Antidepressants taken during pregnancy could harm the unborn baby

The Daily Mail reports that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is warning pregnant mothers that antidepressants taken during pregnancy could harm the unborn baby. In particular they warn that there is an increased risk that babies will be born with a rare lung condition if the mother is taking SSRI antidepressant drugs like Prozac and Seroxat.

Doctors are supposed as far as possible to avoid prescribing drugs to pregnant mothers because pharmaceutical drugs are far, far more harmful/dangerous to unborn babies than they are to the mother herself. It is shameful that medics give so little heed to this precaution. In fact, prescription drugs are also more risky to pregnant women than to women who are not pregnant. - So it's a no no all round...

Coupled with all that, antidepressants don't work anyway! See Anti-depressants are no better than dummy pills

See also amitriptyline

advice for pregnant mothers

And see Sodium in foods.

Non-drug therapies for depression include:

a walk in the country (recommended by MIND, the mental health charity) and

improving nutrition by avoiding dieting (a well-known cause of depression) and avoiding eating salt and salty food.

SSRI antidepressants taken in early pregnancy linked to birth defects in the babies

The Guardian reports that there is a link between women taking certain anti-depressants in the early weeks of pregnancy and birth defects in a small proportion of the babies born to the women.

These SSRI antidepressants include Prozac and Seroxat aka Paxil. Doctors have been warned against prescribing these drugs to pregnant women by the FDA, by the MHRA (UK regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority) and by NICE, nonetheless British GPs have prescibed these pills to pregnant women and other women of childbearing age without warning of the potential dangers. (Seroxat is made by GlaxoSmithKline, the British drug company.)

I urge you to read the whole of the Guardian article. Clearly there have been grave faults by the doctors and by the drug companies. In my opinion, so many drugs are teratogenic (i.e. able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus) that drugs should be completely avoided during pregnancy unless there is a very good reason for them.

Actually there is no good reason to prescribe anti-depressants to anyone. - See Anti-depressants 'no better than dummy pills' about research by a Hull University team led by Prof Irving Kirsch. Not very often doctors seek to reduce pill-taking! - I fervently hope this will save a lot of people having their lives/health damaged by these harmful, useless drugs.

As far as depression goes, a major cause of 'depression' is inadequate nutrition or dieting. Many women attempt to diet, especially during pregnancy, as they fear gaining a lot of weight because of the pregnancy. Dieting by pregnant women should be actively discouraged. It is harmful for both the woman and for the unborn baby. Weight gain is not caused by eating too many calories or not taking enough exercise. It is caused by fluid retention/sodium retention/salt sensitivity and is preventable by minimising salt intake and avoiding salty food.
Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver damage and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.
Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and
http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

See advice for pregnant mothers
Children and Obesity

Associated health conditions
and FAT RETENTION

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations.

Antidepressants in pregnancy 'increase risk of babies suffering heart problems'

Women who take common antidepressants - such as Prozac - early in their pregnancy can significantly increase their chances of having children with heart problems, according to a new study. Expectant mothers who took Prozac were four times as likely as other women to have a baby with a heart abnormality and those who took Seroxat were three times as likely.
Read article in the Daily Telegraph (UK)

Prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs: legal and lethal...)o:

This is an article from the Times. It is long, but well worth reading.

Prescription drugs: legal and lethal

Extracts:

"In one of its less sensational aspects, our escalating fondness for taking drugs that won’t get you arrested can be measured in the 10% annual rise over the past three years in the use of antidepressants, notably our old friend Prozac. The NHS issued 31m scripts for Prozac in 2006, a blanket figure that, however it breaks down in terms of the numbers of users referred to, suggests that a lot of people are regularly taking a powerful antidepressant. Then there are the Valium guzzlers. The Council for Involuntary Tranquilliser Addiction (Cita), run by Liverpool University, guesstimates that there are as many as 1.5m nervous types in this country who have become accidentally addicted to benzodiazepines, the family of tranquillisers to which Valium belongs. Others take them knowingly, for fun. According to Professor Heather Ashton of Newcastle University, author of a pamphlet on addiction to benzodiazepines, these “are now taken illicitly in high doses by 90% of drug abusers worldwide. They are part of the drug scene”. So well integrated are they that abusers will crush the pills and snort or inject them, the same way they might cocaine or heroin.

More worrying in a way, because they attract less attention, are those habit-forming drugs that can be bought without prescription at high-street pharmacies. Concern about these has given rise to a new coinage in the world of drug dependency, “OTCs”, an abbreviation for painkillers bought “over the counter”. This usually refers to the more powerful varieties of OTCs, such as codeine, which contains synthetic opiates. At a conference of the General Medical Association in 2004 it was suggested that there might be 50,000 OTC addicts in Britain today. The authorities are also concerned about OTC drugs causing suicidal tendencies: the European Medicines Agency is calling for OTC drugs to come with a “suicide rating”."

"The prescription drugs causing most concern are antidepressants. Prozac, which has been around for 20-odd years, is old news. The two newcomers currently causing medical debate are the branded drugs Efexor and Cymbalta. These are classed as “selective seratonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors”, or SSNRIs. The added “N” is what makes them special. Unlike Prozac and other SSRIs, these drugs do not simply increase levels of seratonin, the brain chemical that makes us feel more sociable and relaxed. They also boost adrenaline, making us more energetic and sometimes slightly manic."

Just because a doctor has prescribed it, it doesn't mean a drug is safe.

Anti-depressants work 'no better than dummy pills'

Anti-depressants 'no better than dummy pills'

Extract from the Telegraph:

"Researchers discovered the drugs, which cost the taxpayer almost £300 million a year, generally work no better than dummy pills, and said exercise and therapy should first be prescribed instead.

Only a small group of patients with extreme depression showed any beneficial effect, the team from the University of Hull reported.

Prof Irving Kirsch, the lead researcher, said: "In the best interests of patients it is time for a change of emphasis to non-drug treatments and reserve these drugs for very severely depressed patients."

In England 31 million prescriptions were written for anti-depressants in 2006. More than half were for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRI).

The study, published in the journal Public Library of Science: Medicine, looked at the results of 35 clinical trials in the US involving 5,000 patients taking SSRIs, including Prozac, Efexor and Seroxat. Prof Kirsch said patients taking the drugs did improve, but so did those on a placebo - showing most of the effect was psychological.

He added: "One of the problems with anti-depressants is the risk of side-effects, such as an increased potential for suicide. Given that risk, it is important to know there are alternatives that seem to do as well or nearly as well but without the side-effects.""

31 million antidepressant prescriptions in a year in England is ludicrous! - Dangerous drugs like this should be avoided. Doctors' prescribing freedom should be curbed.

Non-drug therapies for depression include

a walk in the country (recommended by MIND, the mental health charity) and

improving nutrition by avoiding dieting (a well-known cause of depression) and avoiding eating salt and salty food.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

More and more children are being harmed by the reckless and ever-increasing prescribing of anti-depressants to children

How do we tackle the rise in the number of children on anti-depressants? - Independent

Personally, I'd make it illegal for doctors to prescribe antidepressants or any other psychotropic junk (like ritalin, say) to children, and impose severe sanctions on any who then issued such prescriptions to children, including having the doctor automatically and permanently barred from dealing with children in any capacity as a doctor.

I don't buy the claim that doctors are merely responding to pressure from parents. - Nonsense! - Too many doctors have become drug-pushers for BigPharma, to the great detriment of the nation's health and happiness.

Research commissioned by MIND, the mental health charity, indicates that a walk in the country is more effective at reducing depression than antidepressants are; their benefit is small if any, their adverse effects are many, and very serious, and very common. - It is a pity they are prescribed at all; and patients are rarely warned about them. - And as you will see in the extract below, the drug companies cannot be trusted to tell the truth about their damaging products, which ruin so many lives.

Extract from the article:

"When Stephen Bailey was eight years old, he was prescribed Librium by his doctor. That was the beginning of a 24-year addiction to mind-altering drugs which, Bailey says, changed the course of his life and saw him descend into a world of fits, screaming and violence whenever he tried to withdraw. A commonly-used tranquilliser, Librium is one of the benzodiazepine family, and was prescribed to calm Bailey after he suffered from migraines and flashing lights in response to a routine set of vaccinations.

"I became absolutely petrified of the world, full of terror, in particular that I would swallow my tongue," says Bailey. "It felt like my mind was controlled by something else and I retreated into my own world. They affected my thinking in every way. I felt like I was chemically lobotomised."

Because of stories such as this, Librium, Valium and other member of the benzodiazepine family, are now not routinely prescribed to children. But that doesn't mean we have stopped medicating our children – far from it. New figures released last month show that in the past decade the number of prescriptions for mind-altering drugs, including anti-depressants such as Prozac, given to children under the age of 16 has more than quadrupled. Last year, there were more than 631,000 cases of drugs such as these given for mental health problems. In the mid 1990s, this figure was 146,000.

This increase is in spite of guidelines from Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) that GPs should offer three months of " talking therapy" before reaching for the prescription pad.

The issue was highlighted by the case of Mollie Murphy, who last year was prescribed a course of anti-depressants at the age of four after she became distraught at being separated from her friends when she failed to get a place at her local school. "We are in danger of not having learnt from the benzodiazepine story," says child psychiatrist Dr Mike Shooter, chairman of the children's mental health charity Young Minds. "People saying we're going through the same cycle with anti-depressants. The prescription rate is rising fast, and it worries me."

According to Dr Shooter, the reasons for the dramatic increase in prescriptions are complex. "One factor is the pharmaceutical companies marketing these drugs as happiness in the form of a pill," he says. " In the process they have concealed the fact that they don't actually bring happiness. There is also controversy at the moment about drug companies concealing lack of effectiveness." Dr Shooter believes that young people are increasingly turning to doctors with problems of life rather than actual depression. "The demand for a diagnosis is great," he says. "The greater the pressure the GP is under, the greater the temptation to reach for the prescription pad."

According to a Unicef report published earlier this year, the UK is now one of the least happy places for a young person to be brought up in the whole of western Europe. "There are more socio-economic problems facing children these days than there have ever been," says Dr Shooter. " I've worked in areas where there's a lot of family breakdown, alcohol abuse, violence and so on. It's pretty desperate, and young people living in these situations can be miserable. Half the kids I saw would satisfy the criteria of ADHD or depression – but they were just reacting behaviourally to the mess they lived in. The answer is not a pill." "

Prozac - a very iffy drug...)o:

Eternal sunshine - by Anna Moore in The Observer

This is a very enlightening article. - I urge you to read it - to read all of it; it is a long article. - I especially urge anyone taking, or thinking of taking, antidepressant drugs to read it.

Note: MIND, the respected mental health charity, suggests today that a walk in the country lessens most depression... - Why not try that, instead of assaulting your brain with dodgy psychotropic drugs?

Extract:

"In 1971, when LY110141 - the compound that became Prozac - was developed, depression was rarely discussed and antidepressants largely restricted to the psychiatric unit. People went to their GPs with 'anxiety' and 'nerves'. Tranquillisers such as Valium were a likely response.

Eli Lilly, the company behind Prozac, originally saw an entirely different future for its new drug. It was first tested as a treatment for high blood pressure, which worked in some animals but not in humans. Plan B was as an anti-obesity agent, but this didn't hold up either. When tested on psychotic patients and those hospitalised with depression, LY110141 - by now named Fluoxetine - had no obvious benefit, with a number of patients getting worse. Finally, Eli Lilly tested it on mild depressives. Five recruits tried it; all five cheered up. By 1999, it was providing Eli Lilly with more than 25 per cent of its $10bn revenue.

Fluoxetine was handed to Interbrand, the world's leading branding company (Sony, Microsoft, Nikon, Nintendo) for an identity. The name Prozac was picked for its zap: it sounded positive, professional, quick, proey, zaccy. It was marketed in an easy-to-prescribe 'one pill, one dose for all' formula and came when the medical profession and media were awash with horror stories about Valium addiction.

Prozac hit a society that was in the mood for it. National campaigns (supported by Eli Lilly) alerted GPs and the public to the dangers of depression. Eli Lilly funded 8m brochures (Depression: What you need to know) and 200,000 posters. Previous antidepressants were highly toxic, lethal if overdosed on and had other nasty side-effects. Prozac was pushed as entirely safe, to be doled out by anyone. It was the wonder drug, the easy answer, an instant up, neurological eldorado. When launch day dawned, patients were already asking for it by name.

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Strangely, depression has reached epidemic levels. "

PMT is best relieved by avoiding eating salt and salty food. - See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/pmt.html - This also helps with depression.

The pharmaceutical companies now want to poison your dog too...)o:

New tricks - Telegraph

Extract:

"If you feel down, nowadays you don't have to force a stiff upper lip. Your doctor will prescribe you some wonder drug or other.

But what if your pet feels stressed? The makers of Prozac have come up with a cure for them, too. A tempting chewy pill, available in a succulent beef flavour, will help your poodle feel more perky. "

Good grief! - Antidepressants for dogs now!

Lose weight by eating less salt! - Your dog also will lose weight if you stop feeding him/her with salty food! - Go on! - Try it!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)