Nurses for Human Rights

More and more drugs intended for adults are being prescribed by doctors to children. Bloomberg reports that diabetes type II meds, statins for cholesterol, and high blood pressure meds are on the rise. More alarmingly meds for ADHD continue to rise for off-label use. An interesting quote: “There was also a 40 percent rise in drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with the increase for girls, at 63 percent, rising faster than for boys, at 33 percent.

The researchers also saw a boost of ADHD drug use in 15 to 19 year olds, an age group for which use typically declines as teenagers are taken off the medications. That may be a sign that ADHD drugs are being used more as stimulants to help teens keep up with schoolwork or for recreational use, Cox said. There is a sense that they are being used at that age for productivity at school,'’ said Cox.”

Failure to keep our children healthy with so much proven information available makes me shudder. We really have a problem on our hands as a society when we are feeding our kids the wrong foods for health and ignoring what is known about truly healthy lifestyles. As a nurse, it’s my job to counsel parents on what is right and wrong about the foods we eat. Although social-economics comes in as a factor and cultural dietary habits as well, it means that people are more willing to eat what they feel “everyone else” is devouring without the thought of the consequences. It also tells me that we as a society, do not make the right foods available to everyone. If you have the money available for fresh vegetables and fruits, high grade proteins, etc. then you are the privileged few versus the “get whatever” processed, high simple carbohydrate, devoid of vitamins and mineral foods we can afford. The high-fat dollar menu is our budget savior.

Our future depends of clear thinking, healthy minds. We need leaders who have healthy bodies and good stamina to handle the stress of leadership. Always notice the age and health changes of our presidents after 4 or 8 years in office. The stress takes it’s toll. Our future leaders of industry need creative minds, not minds dulled by atherosclerosis or drug use. Do my fellow nurses have an opinion on this?

Here we see one of the many articles showing up in the press everyday regarding the side effects of present day “atypical” antipsychotics. The profoundly damaging side effects continue to damage the users without hope for recovery from their mental illness and now their newly developed physical illness. The area that is most interesting to Legal Nurse Consultants and Attorney’s should be the area of state welfare and Medicaid. While scholars debate whether a psychiatrist can determine if a small child is depressed, suicidal, or “at risk” for emotional trauma the states Medicaid systems are pouring antipsychotics into children at an alarming rate. Their use is off label and against FDA guidelines. It will take the intelligence and tenacity of our Legal Nurse Consultants and Attorneys to litigate these areas and defend successfully the Human Rights of our children to not be damaged by these drugs in their formative years and to bring under the law the psychiatrist or medical doctor who insists that using these drugs are helpful, not harmful. Nothing could be further from the truth and I applaud my Legal Nurse Consultants and Attorneys who will take the fight to them for all the right reasons.

The underbelly of the pharmaceutical industry is exposed and vulnerable to litigation as mounting evidence grows that informed consent leaves out crucial side effects from the majority of drugs on the market. This article from Pharmalot indicates a social concern for how much and how often drugs are put on the market with known side effects-the most hidden being death. In an editorial from US RECALL NEWS, pharmacist Larry Gohlbom states,”The attorneys in our country have a history of bringing about safer products and protecting our citizens. This is a challenge to attorneys everywhere that an opportunity is being missed. I hope this post will help creative people understand that the opium plant, the same opium plant that has devastated societies for the last 5,000 years, has raised its influence once again in our lifetime. The drug companies call them pain killers. The addict calls them roxies, oxys and blueberries.” This really is the heart of the matter. To protect more patients and trusting consumers from addicting, harmful, and debilitating side effects of drugs, Legal Nurse Consultants, Nurse Attorneys, and Malpractice Attorneys in general should spearhead a movement that will impact our future society for the better. Curb the proliferation of damaging drugs in our society. Offer a milder alternative even if it’s not as effective as a pharmaceutical but gains some relief of a medical condition, and for god’s sake stop damaging our children with psychotropics.

Sen. Grassley requests info on contributions toward the American Psychiatric Association. In my mind, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Using money whether it’s incentives, gifts, contributions, scholarships…to influence medical decisions for treatment is unethical. We have rampant drugging of children with psychotropics and no science behind the mental illness diagnosis used to drug them. I believe the profession calling itself a “medical profession” is going to brought to task…and not soon enough! Read this article.

Very disturbing story. I watch in horror as minutes tick by and no one observes the waiting room or checks on patients who are seeking help. I imagine it’s close to shift change and the night crew is counting the moments before clock out time. I’ve worked emergency rooms. This is deplorable. If mental illness is really going to be legitimate as a medical condition, why aren’t there nurses in the triage area? Why aren’t these patients being tested for medical conditions? You have to read the story and watch the video to feel the whole impact of this. Legal Nurse Consultants should be all over this. Shameful lack of any nursing standards. Read this story and watch the video.

Just when you think you’ve heard everything, something new shows up. The Public and Media has pounded Glaxo regarding the suicidal side effects of Paxil, an SSRI antidepressant. Evidence is now available that it also causes congenital heart defects and it was not revealed. It is my opinion that the pot is beginning to boil over and Big Pharma’s secrets are about to be exposed on a wider scale. I’m so convinced of this that I, along with two other authors, wrote a book detailing the history of Big Pharma and what we see as the conspiracy to produce side effects as an advantage to them to market other drugs to counter-act those side effects. But there is more. We interviewed 10 experts in their field regarding treating patients and what their viewpoints are in this area. It’s eye opening! Dr. Julian Whitaker, MD tells me something in this book that blew my socks off. It’s both hairraising and depressing in what I found out. But the good news is there is a better way around this issue and it’s discussed in the book’s final chapters. Nurses should buy this book, which hits the stands in July 2008, and confront this issue headon. You can read what some of the experts have said in the book here. This issue is not going away. Nurses should think and read outside the box on this and see for themselves as to what is the truth about health, medication, and our societies chance at remaining healthy, sober and able to function in trying times.

The Huffington Post again allows Dr. Peter Breggin, eminent psychiatrist, to explain the fraud of diagnosing children with the label “bipolar” and outlines the consequences of psychiatric treatment. I thought Dr. Breggin brought out an interesting point in how the absence of a strong, involved father can help children with behavior problems. I think nurses have a good instinct about this. As I talk to my fellow nurses on these issues, we mostly agree that stiff discipline and good control help a child when growing up. It’s an unfortunate statistic, but a lot of my peers are single mothers raising children while working full or part-time jobs in nursing. Most have told me that they find themselves having to be stronger than they really want to be with their children in the discipline arena. They tell me that they run their kids lives to the furthest degree they can while working. They stay in touch on the phone and with sitters and family members and guide their daily activities. They all know the consequences of leaving your children un-managed. I have heard thousands of success stories from nurses who have successfully raised their children despite not having a father around and getting them through college or at least gamefully employed. This is no easy task today. This is also true about single fathers raising children. These women and parents demonstrate what love can do for a child’s development. My hats off to my fellow single-parent nurses. What we don’t need is a psychiatrist telling a parent that their child has a chemical imbalance and that they will always have it and they need these toxic psychoactive chemicals forever. This is fraud, a lie, and should be outlawed in an era where Human Rights should be to the forefront and the guidepost that it was intended.

The Willamette Week posted this story about a psychiatrist who simply states that antidepressants don’t work. He says it’s the industries “dirty little secret”. I was surprised, but not really, to find out that 1 in 10 people feel they have to have antidepressants in order to function in life due to depression. What would happen to the suicide and homicide rate if the pharmaceutical companies suddenly had a back-order and couldn’t supply people with their SSRIs? Horrible withdrawal symptoms reported…

The Boston Globe reports that the tragic death after poor medical care of Rebecca Riley has spawned a lawsuit against her psychiatrist, Dr. Kayoko Kifuji in Suffolk Superior Court. The attorneys that are taking the case said, “They made her a 4-year-old zombie,” per Andrew Meyer, Jr, whose Boston law firm Lubin & Meyer specializes in medical malpractice cases. “We don’t believe that she did suffer from bipolar or that this was the appropriate medication.” I think nurses need to take a stronger role in mental health and begin to say we want better and safer practices in this specialty. If we only have drugs to rely on to “manage” our patients, we are going to lose this game. We won’t be bringing people back to health, mentally or physically. Nurses need to insist we want better outcomes for our children and elderly. Psychotropics shorten lives, create devastation to familes by their adverse side effects, and for the most part hide medical problems that are not being addressed appropriately. We need to be better investigators. One of my favorite TV shows is “House”. I like it because Dr. House keeps looking for the underlying causes, not just treating the symptoms. We all need to be a little bit more House. I believe we should outlaw psychotropics for children. That may be drastic or impossible, but I don’t think it is. I think the severist of retardation or autism must be managed, but the largest population is not these types of cases. It’s the school child who gets frustrated in our school system, acts out,  and gets put on psychotropics for mis-behaving. This is the area I’m concerned about. And you should be too, or we will have more Rebecca Riley cases to deal with.

I often wonder how this pill of falsehood about chemical imbalances in the brain causes mental disorders gets swallowed by nurses. We so quickly accept ideas because they show up in medical journals. Not many of us even read the article in full. We’d rather read the summary or abstract and decide from there. We take such things as face value and don’t add our critical thinking skills to the mix. Nurses aren’t taught research methods unless you go on to a Masters and Doctorate program. Even then, the site’s of our critical thinking isn’t turned to substantiate findings from researchers.

From an article in FSU.com, Jill Elish writes that this theory of chemical imbalance is being challenged at least in this one Florida University. She quotes Jeffrey Lacasse, an FSU doctoral candidate and Jonathon Leo, PhD in physiology and professor of neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee. I think the article should be considered by nurses and particularly psychiatric nurses. I give you one quote here and hope you read the article and rethink what we are doing to our mentally ill:

“The media’s presentation of the theory as fact is troublesome because it misrepresents the current status of the theory,” Lacasse said. “For instance, there are few scientists who will rise to its defense, and some prominent psychiatrists publicly acknowledge that the serotonin hypothesis is more metaphor than fact. As the current study documents, when asked for evidence, reporters were unable to cite peer-reviewed primary articles in support of the theory”.

Where is the science behind drugging millions of sufferers from depression and anxiety?