The readers of my
weekly Duty to Warn columns know that I often write about some of the
concerns that I have regarding the once honorable medical profession
that I called my own for 40 years.
Actually, my major
concerns haven’t been solely about physicians, but about the for-profit
systems that have arisen since I was a medical student. Most of the med
school friends that I knew seemed to be serious about their desire to do
good in the world. I sincerely believed that most of us took seriously
the Hippocratic Oath (“first do no harm”) that we all swore to adhere to
when we got our medical degrees.
I was naively grateful
to Eli Lilly and Company when the company gave us reflex hammers,
stethoscopes and a doctor’s bag during our second-year clinical
rotations. I still have them and, although the rubbery parts are getting
pretty brittle now, the chrome plating is still shiny.
The reputation of Lilly
since the 1960s, however, has been increasingly grimy on the ethical
inside but somehow still somewhat shiny when it comes to corporate
profits.
Ever since 1989, there have
been thousands of lawsuits (originating in every state of the union)
that have been brought against Lilly just from its block buster
(so-called “antidepressant” drug Prozac. Prozac received FDA approval
for marketing in 1987 and it didn’t take long for surprised
psychiatrists all over the world to start seeing dramatic increases in
suicide attempts and suicidal thinking among the patients that they had
naively recommended taking the new drug. One set of Prozac class action
suits settled for $1.5 billion.
To mention another example
of Lilly’s dangerous drugs, in 2007 Lilly settled a class action lawsuit
with 18,000 drug-injured patients because it had misrepresented the
serious (and sometimes lethal) adverse effects of its next block buster
drug, the major tranquilizer (aka “antipsychotic” drug) Zyprexa. The
suit cost them a half a billion dollars, which is actually chump change
for Big Pharma corporations like Lilly. More Zyprexa civil and criminal
lawsuits are yet to come over the obesity, diabetes and heart problems
that are caused by the drug. Lilly never took either drug off the
market.
I could go on for a long
time, but it needs to be mentioned that currently there are hundreds, if
not thousands, of lawsuits against Lilly because, in their product
labeling, they mis-represented the incidence of what has come to be
known as the Cymbalta Withdrawal Syndrome. Lilly claimed a 1% incidence
of withdrawal symptoms whereas other studies found significant
withdrawal symptoms in 40% – 50% of long-term Cymbalta users.
Beware of Salespersons Who Come to Your Clinic Bearing Gifts
I could go on and on with
other data detailing Big Pharma’s malfeasance. Those three Lilly drugs
mentioned were easy targets because a number of my patients had been
harmed or hooked on them. But Lilly is not – sadly – atypical when it
comes to lawsuits and legal damages. The large numbers mask the
immensity of the suffering that isn’t outlined. I saw the damages first
hand, but none of my patients ever found a lawyer who was willing to
take their cases.
For most of my career, I am
proud to say that I have been suspicious of drug reps that came bearing
gifts. I did listen to them and also ate an occasional lobster and
steak dinner while enduring a short lecture from some drug
company-affiliated academic physician who had been paid thousands of
dollars (on an all-expenses paid tour) just to give a brief talk about a
specific disorder or drug. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was the
real message.
These same drug reps would
often show up at my clinic, “generously” bringing free pens, pizzas and
post-it notes. Before they left, they would stock the drug sample room
with colorful pills in little boxes that were to be given out free to my
unaware (and often naively grateful) patients, thus saving them a
little money at the start of their “treatment”, but with the high
likelihood of their becoming dependent on the new, very expensive and
potentially addictive drug, which would eventually cost her or her
insurance company a ton of money.
Little did I realize how
cunning were the intentions of the pseudo-magnanimous Eli Lilly and
Company (and all the other Big Pharma companies) that were obviously, in
retrospect, trying to buy my loyalty so early in my career.
Because I spent the last
decade of my career providing holistic, non-drug, mental health care to
patients (who sometimes identified themselves as “psychiatric
survivors”), I became increasingly aware of the dark side of the
psycho-pharmaceutical industry.
In taking careful,
time-consuming histories from my patients (who knew they were being
sickened by their drugs), I learned that most of what had been
previously diagnosed as a permanent “chronic mental illness” (of unknown
cause but still “needing life-long medication”) was in fact just a
temporary affliction that needed good counseling and a brain-healthy
diet and not brain-altering, potentially addicting medications.
I also learned that much of
what had been wrongly diagnosed as a new mental illness diagnosis, a
“worsening” or “relapse” after psychotropic drugs had been prematurely
prescribed or whose dosing had suddenly changed were in fact adverse
effects of the unnecessary drugs that had been prescribed in a
trial-and-error fashion, in too large a dose, for too long a duration,
in unapproved, untested combinations or causing a dangerous
drug-withdrawal syndrome.
Rather than suffering from
mental illnesses “of unknown cause: virtually every one of my patients
were actually suffering from identifiable emotional stresses “of known
cause” (and therefore preventable and more easily treatable).
My patients were actually
undiagnosed victims of psychological trauma in childhood or adolescence,
domestic abuse or the military, so I did a lot of teaching about the
reality of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how easy it is for
health caregivers to make erroneous diagnoses of “mental illnesses of
unknown etiology” if not enough time is taken in the initial interview. I
also taught my patients and their concerned families about the
physiology of the brain, the mechanisms of action of the various drugs
and the molecular structures of the drugs that were sickening them.
But the most time-consuming
and difficult part of my practice was the process of helping them
slowly taper down and hopefully eventually get off of their offending
brain-altering medications. Success at drug withdrawal is difficult to
predict because psychiatric drug-afflicted patients may have been on
their medications for years or decades, in bewildering numbers of
cocktail combinations (none FDA-approved or even tested for safety in
the rat labs), and at various, potentially brain-damaging dosages. And
most of my patients had become dependent/addicted to the offending
drugs, so adverse withdrawal effects were often confusing but very
common.
My purpose here is not to
try to outline the multitude of ways that patients can be helped to get
off of their psych drugs, because each case was entirely different from
one another and therefore each case had to be individualized. Any
attempt to generalize getting through drug withdrawal syndromes is
impossible, because there are so many variables that have to be
evaluated.
Among the many variables
that need to be considered are age, gender, intrauterine (maternal)
drug, alcohol or vaccine exposures, breast-feeding (or not), infant or
childhood vaccine-induced neurological damage, history of family-rearing
traumas that would include neglect or sexual, physical, emotional and
spiritual traumas, physical health, prior and current drug use (illicit
and prescription), past or current nutritional deficiencies, past or
present toxic food ingestion, exposure to environmental toxins
(pollutants in air, water, soil or food), history of head trauma,
history of adolescent vaccine-induced brain damage, etc.
Therefore it is impossible
to describe how any given psychotropic drug-wounded, possibly addicted
and/or mis-diagnosed psychiatric patient can be helped to reverse the
damage, but I do feel it is my duty to warn as many people as I can so
that they can become aware that there are alternatives to psychotropic
drugs or electroshock.
In summary, the major
themes that I have dealt with in some of my columns have included: 1)
the known dangers of the synthetic drugs that are commonly prescribed
for often temporary (not permanent) emotional problems; 2) the serious,
often life-threatening withdrawal syndromes that can result when these
drugs are stopped or tapered down (thus indicating that the drugs were
addictive); 3) information about brain nutrient therapy for
brain-malnourished folks who may actually be neurologically-impaired and
not simply mentally-impaired; 4) safer, non-toxic, non-drug alternative
approaches to mental ill health; 5) information about the reality of
combat and non-combat-induced psychological traumas (PTSD) as causative
factors in mental ill health; and 6) the large variety of aspects of
PTSD that have been mis-diagnosed as “mental illnesses of unknown
origin”.
My experience dealing with
psychiatric survivors is rather unique. My writings were informed by my
clinical experience at a mental institution full of drugged-up patients
and as an independent holistic health care practitioner with over a
thousand patients who had mental ill health issues.
I’m also just one of a
number of black-listed whistle-blowers world-wide who have been “crying
in the wilderness”, with no money from Big Pharma sugar daddies who so
arrange the mainstream media appearances of a host of well-paid,
pro-drug, academic psychiatrists. There are no industry lobbyists or
corporations that are interested in helping us whistle-blowers to refute
– with good science to back up the message – the propaganda coming from
the mega-corporations that are in the drug game primarily for their
next quarter’s profit report and shareholder value, not to mention the
reputation of their highly paid lobbyists, their ad agencies, their
spokespersons and their spin doctors.
American corporations have
no legally enforceable obligation to work for the benefit of the
patients who will be taking sub-lethal doses of their potentially very
toxic products every day for the rest of their lives. And American
vaccine makers are legally immune from prosecution for injury or death
from their potentially neurotoxic vaccines; and brain damage from Big
Pharma’s psych drugs are hard to prove in court, especially with the
power of the company’s million dollar legal teams.
“The further a society (or an industry?) drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
As mentioned above, I took
the Hippocratic Oath the day I received my medical degree, as did the
honorable psychiatrist/authors Peter Breggin, Loren Mosher, Joseph
Glenmullen, David Healy, Grace Jackson and any number of other
courageous and altruistic whistle-blowing physicians who have regarded
it as their sacred duty to warn unsuspecting others about the hidden
dangers of synthetic prescription drugs that are contaminating the
brains and bodies of hundreds of millions of unsuspecting humans.
Courageous psychiatrists like those mentioned above also took their oath
seriously, even though they were all risking the wrath of their
employers and many of the members of their own profession. Each of these
psychiatrists had their careers threatened for rocking the boat. It
seemed that none of their good deeds went unpunished.
George Orwell understood the whistleblower’s dilemma well when he said: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” And
that is where the concept of cognitive dissonance comes in, being
willfully blind or ignorant when being confronted by new truths.
Considering the authors mentioned above and Orwell’s profound truth, I have been in good company.
DISCLAIMER: Readers
who are interested in reducing their psych drug use should consult
their prescribing physician and not suddenly stop them. Stopping drugs suddenly can be more dangerous than starting them.
They should consult a physician knowledgeable in neuroscience, brain
nutrition and with experience in helping people safely discontinue
psychiatric medications.
For elaboration of some of the statements above, please search my video interviews on YouTube at: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=YouTube+Gary+Kohls or read some of my pertinent past columns at the Duluth Reader website at: (http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn).
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Dr. Gary G. Kohls, Global Research, 2015
Become a Member of Global Research
No comments:
Post a Comment