U.S. doctors steeped in financial ties – drug money from Big Pharma

Pharmaceutical firms in the United States are shelling out massive funds for doctors travel and entertainment expenses in hopes of boosting sales of new drugs. More than 160,000 doctors have received related payments in 2011 already. The big push includes free samples, hospital detailing, journal ads, gifting, and the sponsoring of continuing medical education, but patients fear this all leads to doctors prescribing popular, money making drugs instead of following standard of care practices .

Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and AstraZeneca top the list of companies also spending far more on “marketing” than on research, with a total estimated $57,000 billion in overall marketing expenditures in just one year in the United States.

The United States of Adderall

Since 1996 the annual amount of Ritalin type drugs approved for production by the DEA multiplied 4000 times to 50 million kilograms, and for Adderall 10000 times to 26 million kilograms. In more common terms, 83,776 tons of legal speed were approved for production in 2010 equaling more than half a pound for every man, woman and child in America.

The U.S. is a signatory to a 1972 United Nations treaty monitoring the production and sale of potentially addicting substances. The U.N.’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) based in Vienna, monitors the production of legal stimulants worldwide. INCB data shows that in 2009 the U.S., representing 4 percent of the world’s population, produced 88 percent of the world’s legal Ritalin type drugs. Canada uses a third per capita of prescription stimulants compared to the U.S. — Germany, one eighth, the U.K. one twelfth, Japan, one fiftieth.

Depression? Don’t believe it —Big Pharma has gained an ever greater hold over our mental & emotional lives

Over the last 40 years the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the bible of the psychiatric professions – has spawned more and more diagnostic categories, “inventing” disorders along the way and radically reducing the range of what can be construed as normal or sane. Meanwhile Big Pharma, feeding its appetite for profits and ours for drugs, has gained an ever greater hold over our mental and emotional lives, medicalising normality.

Australian MP Claims 1 in 5 Federal Politicians Taking Antidepressants

“I do know that at least 20 per cent of the parliament are taking some sort of antidepressant medication,” he said. “I don’t know who they are, but I know they are. I certainly think for people who are under a lot of stress, like politicians or senior ministers, a lot thrive on that. But others who get a lot of stress, well that can cause a depressive condition.”

Mr Robb made the comments at the South Australian Press Club, where he spoke and answered questions about the challenges of managing depression and life in the Liberal Party.

Are you shy? Then you have a mental disorder

Even in these overly medicalised times, where feeling well is increasingly confused with awaiting diagnosis, the idea that well over a third of Europe is suffering from a mental disorder just doesn’t tally with our actual lived experience. After all, does it not seem absurd to think that one in every three Europeans is mentally ill? As many have observed before, absurdity abounds in the psychiatric worldview. The most banal of everyday behaviours, emotional states that I’d wager almost everyone has encountered at some point in their lives, have been given technical, medical-sounding names. So shyness becomes ‘avoidant personality disorder’; anger becomes ‘intermittent explosive disorder’; and if the experts get their way, not throwing stuff away will become ‘hoarding disorder’. In an incredible bit of insightless prose, we are told by DSM’s recent consultation document that, ‘The symptoms [of hoarding disorder] result in the accumulation of a large number of possessions that fill up and clutter active living areas of the home or workplace to the extent that their intended use is no longer possible’.

CCHR International

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