Nurses for Human Rights

In the Indy Star it’s reported that Eli Lilly has settled 900 cases of personal injury regarding their anti-psychotic Zyprexa. It should be important to nurses that giving these patients, now damaged by this drug, the full scope of the possible side-effects would have been considered full informed consent. When a drug company does not disclose these side-effects so that nurses and physicians can then weigh the consequences of this treatment and other alternatives, it puts us professionals in a legal nightmare as much as a moral one. Knowing these antipsychotics can produce these effects, how then can we prescribe them to growing children? Without evidence that there is a physical reason for the mental illness as a causative source, and depending on an interpretation and theory of research data for it’s rationality for giving such powerful drugs, we have an ethical duty to 1) know all we must know about a drug to be given, 2) know what the dangers are regarding a specific drug therapy, 3) know alternatives to that specific drug therapy, and 4) provide the patient with that information, untainted by the informers personal opinion, of the above 3 points so that said patient can make a decision…”do I want to accept this therapy” or “I would rather have the alternative therapy”. This story should alert you to the situation we nurses are being put in…we aren’t being told what the real dangers are, we are giving human beings damaging drugs without evidence based results from long-term trials, and we are not informing these patients of alternatives.

In November 2007, a report surfaced that an LPN and a psych aide used electric shocks, used in an aversion therapy(GED), to punish two resident teenagers in the facility. This story, here provided, is disturbing to the core. Firstly because a nurse is involved. Secondly, because we are still using this archaic, obviously abusive “therapy”. It disturbs me, and should disturb you as well, that we use any “therapy” that involves causing pain to a patient. This is a human rights issue…torture can not be disguised as “therapy”. Having your skin shocked, is painful. Full ECT shock is painful. It’s abuse and should be outlawed since there is no evidence that it actually makes a person better. On the contrary, it only makes them worse. I am calling out all you nurses who are supporting this practice to re-read your Nurses Code of Ethics and point number 5 of the Declaration for Human Rights AGAIN. You have a misunderstood concept and should not be practicing nursing in my opinion. A patient puts their health and lives in your trust. When you use outright abuse as a therapy, no matter what a false “science” has said about it’s usefulness, you are not practicing nursing. We are not sheep, we do not follow MDs blindly. If you don’t have the guts to stand up to any MD, psychiatrist, or manager telling you to do something outright abusive to a patient, GET OUT OF NURSING! We need thinkers, we need moral and ethical practitioners, we need heroes, and we need courageous bedside and community nurses who will say no to any therapy that pretends to be helpful when it clearly is not. Stop using electric shock devices on people. It’s abusive. It violates their human rights. Sign this petition:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/NrseCall2Arms/

St. Petersburg Times writer Robert Farley exposes the plan that Eli Lilly seeks FDA approval of the harmful anti-psychotic Zyprexa for use in children. Despite the lawsuits already on Lilly’s head, the drug maker is pushing for use in children. Zyprexa causes significant weight gain and diabetes in some cases, and with no known blood analysis or brain scan to diagnose schizophrenia, depression or bipolar disorders, we are putting our childrens’ future health at risk because of behavior problems. This drug is being used off-label for depression and anxiety in adults. How depressed are they going to get when they gain 30 lbs.? Do you know of any teenage girls who won’t get depressed when their weight goes up? This is just more evidence of the insanity that arises from a pharmaceutically driven practice such as psychiatry. An overhaul of the mental health field is sorely needed as there are other solutions to childrens’ behavior issues that do work and are not chemically based. Nurses should not be so quick to follow the status quo in psychiatry today. It’s a train ready to derail…   read the article here:

http://tinyurl.com/2sylxp

Dr. John Grohol, Psychologist, writes a great blog article in PsychCentral.com. Nurses for Human Rights agrees with Dr. Grohol and other great Psychologists like Dr. John English who decry the practice of using adult drugs on children without adequate testing. It is N4HRs view that such practice is “experimentation” and violates the Human Rights of children. Biological Psychiatry has no proof of their physiologic link to their faudulent disorders for mental health. They are desparately looking for something they can claim as proof for making billions of dollars from and for the pharmaceutical industry and justify their practice.

Read this great article/opinion and make a decision of what kind of nurse would allow this to continue with so much evidence now available of the damaging effects on the neurologic and mental health of these kids? This practice violates our Code of Ethics for Nurses.

Sign this petition and let’s let the legislators know we want this investigated and changed:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/NrseCall2Arms/

As suspected, more long-term studies are now available on the effects of psycho-stimulants on our children. The BBC reports a multimiodal study of 600 children since 1990 in the US finds that the ADHD medicated children DID NOT do better in learning as compared to those who were not placed on medication, that the children suffered stunted physical growth, and long-term use has been reported to create children/teenagers with aggressive behavior. The study made the bold summation “There’s no indication that medication’s better than nothing in the long run.”  Here is evidence-based practice staring us in the face. Nurses who blindly go on supporting this practice are violating our CODE OF ETHICS and pass off some written form of consent for FULL INFORMED CONSENT which should be informing parents of these findings. At this point in our knowledge base on psycho-stimulant use in children, we should be demanding an FDA reversal on approving these drugs for anyone under 18 years of age. Sign this petition and let’s correct our mistakes before we damage a whole generation of young minds:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/NrseCall2Arms/

In this article from Advance for Nurses online magazine, author Sandy Keefe, RN outlines the need for early detection of lead poisoning in young children. Once more, she identifies the link between lead toxicity levels and ADHD and learning disorders. In her article she notes that there are health centers on campus at schools with Nurse Practitioners available to test any child who is identified as having learning disabilities. They do the correct action of doing a full physical workup looking for known causes of ADHD symptoms, namely lead poisoning. There is no quick referral to psychiatry for psycho-stimulants that only mask the real problem. My hat is off to those nurses who see the light. Physical illnesses can and will produce mental and emotional symptoms that can be corrected with proper testing and medical intervention.

http://tinyurl.com/2949ls

CNN reports that a new science is emerging in the last 10 years called Biomonitoring. Essentially, we can now test for traces of chemicals in humans that we couldn’t before. In a recent study, high levels of industrial chemicals were found in children at toxic levels as young as 18 months old. This should give us a clue as to why an increase in Autism, ADHD, and other “mental health” disorders emerge at earlier ages. Here’s an excerpt from the article,

“We are the humans in a dangerous and unnatural experiment in the United States, and I think it’s unconscionable,” said Dr. Leo Trasande, assistant director of the Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.

Trasande says that industrial toxins could be leading to more childhood disease and disorders.

“We are in an epidemic of environmentally mediated disease among American children today,” he said. “Rates of asthma, childhood cancers, birth defects and developmental disorders have exponentially increased, and it can’t be explained by changes in the human genome. So what has changed? All the chemicals we’re being exposed to.”

An article in the New York Times today points out that people who take sleeping pills tend to gain only 19 minutes more of sleep time versus a placebo. A side affect of using sleeping pills is memory loss. Some people just didn’t remember that they had difficulty trying to get to sleep. If you remember the problems we had with Ambien, people would sleep walk and do odd things while apparently sleeping peacefully. One woman in the article woke up with a broken wrist and didn’t remember how she did it. Some people reported taking sleeping pills before traveling on airplanes only to wake up in another city and forgetting what they were going there for. Many nurses have observed the “sleep hangover” effect in patients in the morning. They are less alert, sometimes falling asleep eating breakfast, etc. This phenomena prompted the FDA to put warnings on sleeping pills about driving and using heavy machinery.

Read the article and note that it speaks about the lost “awake” time these pills cause. It is a concern for us, as a society, to have people who take sleeping pills and then getting up early morning (or early evenings like us late shift nurses) only to climb into an automobile and drive to work “half asleep”. Would it concern you as a patient if your brain surgeon was going to operate on you first thing in the morning after taking Halcion, Lunesta, or Ambien? It does me because our society has turned into pharmaceutical junkies and the collective “awakeness” or “present time concsciousness” is lowered by the proliferation of anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-psychotic and now sleeping pills in our general populatioin. There are actually healthy supplements for falling and staying asleep. I would recommend my personal sleeplessness remedy. To calm my “nerves” I take 2-3 ProDHA omega oil capsules, 1-200 mg of Thiamine/B-1 tabs, and 0.5mg to 1mg of Melatonin. I take them 30 minutes before retiring to bed and I can’t keep my eyes open. This may not work for everyone, but there are plenty of heath food stores with sleep remedies and they don’t cost $3.50 a pill!!

Read the rest of this entry »

On September 21, 2007 the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report via The Lancet on what issues are apparent in children’s medications today. They point to the issues we speak of here, that is, off-label use, long-term effects, drug efficacy in pediatric “dosages” and the problem of over-medication, and identification of side-effects on younger children who can not verbalize a sensation or feeling or mental ability. Once more, I contend that there is no possible way an MD, Psychiatrist, or Pediatrician is giving a full INFORMED CONSENT to the parents because the MDs (and Nurse Practitioners) have no way of knowing what damages psychiatric drugs are doing to these children. To me, this falls under the definition of “experiment”: 

1.     a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc.: a chemical experiment; a teaching experiment; an experiment in living. 

2.     the conducting of such operations; experimentation: a product that is the result of long experiment

3.     to try or test, esp. in order to discover or prove something: to experiment with a new procedure 

This subject should not be glossed over by nurses. We are the advocates of our patients.

We must decide as a group how we are going to voice our concerns as it’s our Code of Ethics that is being  challenged and the children’s Human Rights being ignored.

“Safety of medicines in children as an afterthought is an unacceptable state of affairs. Children have a right to safe and effective medicines and nations’ health systems should be judged on how they treat their children.” (The Lancet)

 Sign this petition:

 http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/NrseCall2Arms/