A study from the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark -- led by professor and center director Peter Gotzche -- has revealed that the vast majority of psychiatric drugs do far more harm than good. The results indicated that many of the drugs in this class only provide modest benefits and most who use them would actually be better off without them.
The ground-breaking paper by Peter Gotzche revealed that most anti-depressants and other dementia drugs do very little for patients, but do carry many serious health risks. Gotzche says that in addition to being useless, the drugs are also vastly over-prescribed to people who are unlikely to benefit from them.
For example, SSRIs, or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, have been found to worsen depression in many instances, and have been found to provoke suicides and even homicides in patients. Most psych medications have no real proof of how effective they will be for a given patient, which should indicate that their use should be more limited -- not more widespread. Unfortunately, Big Pharma is a pretty corrupt business, and the more people doctors peddle their garbage products to, the more money they make.
Gotzche posits that some of the most useless and over-prescribed psychotropic drugs that we could all do without include ADHD medications, antidepressants and prescriptions for dementia patients. Over-prescription and inappropriate use of anti-psychotic drugs in dementia patients is also of particular concern. Alzheimers.org.uk reports that upwards of 150,000 people in the UK suffering with dementia have been inappropriately prescribed an anti-psychotic drug. The website also notes that the use of these drugs contributes to about 1,800 deaths per year. Alzheimer's Society also states that these kinds of drugs are often used to control patient behavior, rather than having caretakers take the time to learn and understand their behavior. For example, a patient that is acting angrily may actually be experiencing distress but is unable to explain why, and then becomes agitated. The poor patient is then prescribed some mind-numbing drug to keep them quiet and complacent until the end of their days.
Many people will argue that there are tons of people who benefit from the use of these drugs, but their experience does not mean it is the standard. Nor does it outweigh the risk factors associated with the use of psychotropic drugs, especially in the elderly. Anti-psychotics are primarily used to make dementia patients easier to work with; not for patient benefit. In fact, use of these drugs can actually make a patient's symptoms worse.
Big Pharma is an extremely corrupt business -- corporations often fund and perform the majority of the studies on their own products. How can anyone rationally trust what they are selling?
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