BOOKS ADDRESSING INFORMED CONSENT
Bipolar Children: Cutting-Edge Controversy, Insights, and Research
by Sharna Olfman
Sick children, or a sick society?
November 1, 2007 Review By Ben Hansen (Traverse City, Michigan)
The number of U.S. children diagnosed with bipolar disorder rose an astounding 4,000% in the past ten years. This startling fact drives home the urgency of this important new book edited by Sharna Olfman and bringing together some of the world's most distinguished experts in the field.
Each of the book's nine contributors offers a unique perspective on the issue, providing readers with a comprehensive view of a controversial and disturbing subject.
Among the most passionate voices are those of Dr. David Healy and Dr. Joanna Le Noury, who dissect the pharmaceutical industry's unscrupulous strategies to expand the psychiatric drug market, resulting in the unprecedented "tidal wave" of child drugging currently sweeping our nation.
Award-winning journalist Robert Whitaker writes a carefully documented chapter citing solid scientific evidence showing that the widespread practice of medicating young children with stimulants like Ritalin or antidepressants like Prozac has fueled an explosion of drug side effects including psychosis, mania and suicidal impulses. These drug reactions are then misinterpreted as symptoms of severe mental illness, resulting in a mis-diagnosis of bipolar disorder which leads to treatment with "mood stabilizers" often combined in drug cocktails including major tranquilizers like Risperdal or Seroquel. We may be witnessing a drug-induced epidemic of mental and physical disabilities directly caused by the irresponsible and misguided medical mis-treatment of our nation's children. Psychology professor Daniel Burston looks at what is happening and calls it "the chemical colonization of childhood."
Regardless of who or what we choose to blame for causing this catastrophe -- Big Pharma, bad parenting, overcrowded schools, environmental toxins, television violence, etc. -- one thing is certain: nothing will change until DOCTORS stop making the diagnoses and DOCTORS stop writing the prescriptions. What will it take to bring about such a change?
Perhaps we should begin focusing less on the children who are diagnosed, and more on the doctors who do the diagnosing. Lawrence Diller writes, "Only economic factors, the threat of legal action, or very negative publicity (e.g., children's deaths while taking antidepressants) have widespread influence on doctors' prescribing practices and treatment."
In the book's final chapter, epidemiologist Philip Landrigan sounds the alarm over the growing number of neurotoxic chemicals including mercury that are poisoning our environment. Landrigan writes, "It is striking that the mental health community has virtually ignored the health risks to children growing up in a world that is awash with thousands of synthetic chemicals, hundreds of which are already known to be poisonous to the brain."
How ironic, then, if our society's response to the harm caused by environmental toxins is to give our children drugs -- chemical substances that are toxic to growing bodies and vulnerable brains!
Bipolar Children: Cutting-Edge Controversy, Insights, and Research
by Sharna Olfman is available atamazon.com
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Ethics, the Medical Profession and the Pharmaceutical Industry
by Dr. Howard Brody
"A profession is not just a way of making money; it’s a form of public trust. ...Medicine has for many decades now been betraying this public trust.” - Dr. Howard Brody. Read more about the unholy alliance between medical providers and the drug makers in Dr. Brody’s new book , available fromAmazon.
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Do You Really Need Bypass Surgery?
by Howard H. Wayne, MD
Each year over two million patients undergo coronary angiograms, coronary bypass surgery, angioplasty or have stents inserted into their coronary arteries. The vast majority undergoing these interventions are incorrectly told that these procedures must be done immediately, and without the recommended intervention, they are at great risk for a heart attack or death. Rarely is the patient provided with true informed consent about the high rate of complications of such intervention, including a heart attack or death, or that there are other options for that are far safer, more effective and less costly. The author ofHow To Protect Your Heart From Your Doctor andLiving Longer With Heart Disease brings you valuable information to assist you with understanding heart surgery. Available from the publisher: Health Information Press 4727 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 300 Los Angeles, CA 90010 Tel # 1-800 MED-SHOP
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Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher
By Gwen Olsen
Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher provides an inside story of the intimate and corrupting nature of the relationship between drug salespeople and prescribing physicians. Gwen Olsen describes her career as a sales rep with several of the top pharmaceutical houses. She was highly recognized (and rewarded) for her ability to push new drugs on wary docs, even as she repeatedly witnessed the sometimes deadly effects on their patients. The impetus for her transformation from drug pusher to whistleblower was her personal experience: a harrowing roller coaster existence on powerful mind-altering prescription drugs to which she had immediate access. Ultimately she became a victim of her own sales pitch, barely groping onto enough sanity to extract herself from the morass of chemically-induced psychosis. Her story makes the urgent call to informed consent very real and uncomfortably close to home.
Available from http://www.gwenolsen.com/
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Rethinking Psychiatric Drugs: A Guide for Informed Consent
by Grace E. Jackson, M.D.
As a practicing psychiatrist Dr. Jackson raised the ire of her colleagues for her common-sense objections to the usual and ordinary practice of relentless dispensing of mind-altering drugs. This book provides excellent descriptions of the vast unknowns in the field of psycho-pharmacology. One comes to understand that the psychotropic drug marketing machine is beautiful and effective, but is based on almost no science; just keep in mind how such pharmacological double-speak would be rejected immediately as junk science if the topic were diabetes or glaucoma. This is a good read for any medical professional.
Available fromhttp://www.authorhouse.com/
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Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and The Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
by Robert Whitaker
Mad In America starts with a well-researched account of the earliest days of treatment of the insane , detailing the horrors promoted by father of American psychiatry Benjamin Rush, to the Quaker movement for humane care, and brings us through the rise and fall of the insanity epidemic in the late 1800s, to the modern day world of irresponsible drugging.
Available fromhttp://www.basicbooks.com/
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The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About Itby Marcia Angell, M.D.
The author is a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, whose advertising content is 60% by volume. Dr. Angell dared to point out that the emperor had no clothes when she criticized the undue influence of pharmaceutical manufactures in scientific research and publishing. In this book Dr. Angell provides a clear explanation of the financial, regulatory and legislative backgrounds of the most profitable and protected business in America.
Available fromhttp://www.randomhouse.com/ Submit Your Review
Dispensing with the Truth: The Victims, the Drug Companies, and the Dramatic Story Behind
the Battle over Fen-Phen
by Alicia Mundy
At the time of this book some 75% of the one million women who had taken the diet drug combo Fen-Phen had been identified to have some adverse effect. This is a very readable and fascinating story of what the manufacturers knew before the drug was marketed, how the FDA sat on data that could be used to save lives, the interaction of special interests and the FDA, and the tremendous role of perfectly legal but deceptive reporting and marketing practices.
Available fromhttp://www.stmartins.com/ Submit Your Review
Bending the Law: The Story of the Dalkon Shield Bankruptcy
by Richard B. Sobol
Bending the Law is a detailed account of the legal maneuvers that made the Dalkon Sheild bankruptcy so precedent-setting in its genre. The actual stories of physically and emotionally devastated women and families are contrasted with an intricate cutthroat legal trail. One learns how the very legal and regulatory systems that were constructed to protect consumers were successfully manipulated to allow the manufacturers to avoid accountability. The author provides the lay person with an amazing story spanning some two decades, but the significance of the landmark decisions are probably better appreciated by the professional arbiter.
Available fromhttp://www.press.uchicago.edu/ Submit Your Review
Selling Sickness
by Ray Moynihan, Alan Cassels
Selling Sickness is a very frank look at the Madison Avenue world of invented diseases, for example the “scourge” of alopecia (normal male pattern baldness) to the “devasting illness” of vaginal atrophy (genital dryness that accompanies normal aging). It could be an entirely amusing account of a culture gone mad. However the irony cannot overcome the outrage that develops when one learns details of the degraded compromises of scholarly institutions, the undermining of the trusted government entities that pretend to protect consumers, and the whore-like availability of degreed professionals who will say anything for a buck.
Available fromhttp://www.greystonebooks.ca/ Submit Your Review
Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs
by Stephen Fried
Bitter Pills is an accounting of the investigative trail into the world of known and knowable adverse medical drug effects. For the author it started with his wife's strange behavior after treatment with the antibiotic Floxin for a simple infection. He describes the legislative, political and public relations maneuvers behind a number of drug toxicities. The book describes the facts behind the suppression of drug toxicity information, and includes data from the CDC, FDA, WHO, Federal Trade Commission and Congressional committees. The author's specific documentation reveals that almost no class of drugs is untouched by deceptive practices in some facet or other of development, testing, reporting and marketing. The book includes facts about a broad range of drug classes from antibiotics, AIDS and arthritis drugs to the acne drug Accutane, epilepsy drugs and heart pills to the stomach pill Zantac, cholesterol drug Zocor to psychotropic Zoloft.
Available fromhttp://www.bantam.com/ Submit Your Review
Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat
by Fran Hawthorne
Inside the FDA provides specific drug toxicity horror stories as well as stunning therapeutic successes to illustrate the processes of drug development, testing, approval, marketing and recalls. There are excellent summaries of the play of money, science and politics behind thalidomide, Rezulin, SSRIs, Vioxx and others. The book includes a section on the history of the agency, a discussion of direct to consumer advertising, the issue of off-label prescribing and the lack of innovative new drug development.
Available fromhttp://www.wiley.com/ Submit Your Review
The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers
by Katharine Greider
Big Fix started as a response to the request of a representative from the AFL-CIO for an easy-to-understand piece on how the prescription drug industry works. The author's discoveries expose how the government coordinates with drug makers to 'rip off' American consumers. She sticks to non-technical language language to clearly delineate the laws, agreements and arrangements that result in America sustaining the highest priced, most heavily subsidized, deceptively slick legal drug market in the world.
Available fromhttp://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/ Submit Your Review
Lipitor: Thief of Memory, Statin Drugs and the Misguided War on Cholesterol
by Duane Graveline
The author is a physician and former flight surgeon for NASA who followed his doctors orders to take Lipitor to lower his cholesterol. Lipitor caused a disturbing global amnesia. He found that others on the statin drugs had similar experiences, and he launched into an intense investigation aimed at uncovering the mechanisms of this adverse effect. This led him to question how a drug can get to be the best-selling prescription pharmaceutical in the world when its safety and effectiveness has not been conclusively established. He documents scientific evidence that challenges the validity of the cholesterol lowering hype. The book is easy-to-read and very well documented.
Available fromhttp://www.spacedoc.net/ Submit Your Review
Powerful Medicines
by Jerry Avorn
Dr. Avorn uses examples from his medical practice to illustrate the good, the bad and the ugly of medical drugs. The reader is indoctrinated with the idealistic concepts and the more elementary statistical formulae that are the foundations of evidence-based medicine. Dramatic stories of individual patient successes and losses serve as a basis for discussion of the realities of informed consent in day to day practice.
Available fromhttp://www.randomhouse.com/ Submit Your Review
Do We Still Need Doctors?: A Physician's Personal Account of Practicing Medicine Today
by John D. Lantos
Pediatrician Dr. Lantos examines the interactions of morals, business and technology on the doctor-patient relationship. He discusses the implications of informed consent in the mixed milieu of cost-conscious requirements, increasingly toxic medicines and an active malpractice environment. Another side of the informed consent coin is presented by issues unique to the modern era, including the availability of screening tests for healthy populations and euthanasia.
Available fromhttp://www.routledge.com/ Submit Your Review
Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent
by Paul Julian Weindling Submit Your Review
Informed Consent
by John A. Byrne Submit Your Review
On The Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health
by Jerome P. Kassirer, M.D. Submit Your Review In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human
Experimentation
by Andrew Goliszek Submit Your Review
Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans
by Jonathan D. Moreno Submit Your Review
Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream
by Carl Elliott, Peter D. Kramer Submit Your Review
Living Longer with Heart Disease: The Noninvasive Approach that Will Save Your Life
by Howard H. Wayne, MD Submit Your Review
Overdosed America
by John Abramson Submit Your Review
The $800 Million Pill
by Merrill Goozner Submit Your Review
Blaming the Brain: The Truth About Drugs and Mental Health
by Elliot Valenstein Submit Your Review
Murderous Science
by Benno Muller-Hill Submit Your Review
Szasz Under Fire: The Psychiatric Abolitionist Faces His Critics
Edited by Jeffrey A. Schaler Submit Your Review
FDA Inside and Out
by S. Parisian Submit Your Review
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