Re: Prozac Nation? Is the Party Over?
From: Barbara Schwarz (StilllovingMarty_at_myway.com)
Date: 08/27/04
- Next message: W_B: "Re: Bell's pasly related to wisdom tooth infection"
- Previous message: GaryG: "Re: How to Become a Christian, Version 1.01"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: 27 Aug 2004 12:31:10 -0700
newzforyou@aol.com (NewzForYou) wrote in message news:<20040827081237.04872.00001902@mb-m12.aol.com>...
> Prozac Nation? Is the Party Over?
>
> Fri Aug 20,11:53 AM ET
>
> By Richard C. Morais - Forbes.com
>
> Nancy Hugo, a 57-year-old housewife in Corvallis, Ore., had recently been
> prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft by her internist when she found herself in
> the bathroom, looking at a Bic shaver and wondering if she could get the blade
> out of its plastic. In the living room she zeroed in on a pair of long scissors
> she had inherited from her grandmother. "I kept on wanting to pick them up and
> gouge my eye out," she recalls. Trying to occupy her mind at the computer, she
> fought the "urge to slam the phone into the side of my head."
>
> Hugo survived the weekend; her drug doses were reduced and she was switched to
> antidepressant Paxil. This time, however, she experienced akathisia'a
> medicine-induced agitation and restlessness that some patients on
> antidepressants describe as the feeling of bugs crawling through the skin'and
> an extreme bout of mania. "What spooks me now is that I thought I'd recognize
> when I was having trouble with the medications," she says. "But it was a week
> later before I realized, 'Oh, my God, what have I done?'"
>
> Both Zoloft and Paxil are Prozac-type drugs known as SSRIs, or selective
> serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Do such drugs cause mania and violent
> obsessions? That question is now being debated in many a doctor's office, court
> of law and legislature. Whatever the correct scientific answer, the mere fact
> that the question is being asked represents a new phase in the evolution of
> SSRI medications and a threat to the well-being of the companies that make the
> drugs.
>
> When Prozac was new, it was heralded (in, for example, the 1993 hit Listening
> to Prozac) as a wonder drug with little in the way of side effects. The few
> naysayers were for the most part fringe sorts like Scientologists. Now a giant
> pall of misgiving is descending on SSRIs: Tearful family members are telling
> their congressmen how the drugs caused their children to commit suicide;
> Britain has limited their use in children; a suit by New York Attorney General
> Eliot Spitzer claims GlaxoSmithkline suppressed evidence that the drugs don't
> work in children and can endanger them; and the Food & Drug Administration is
> studying whether it should mandate ominous warning labels.
>
> The second-guessing about SSRIs comes just as the earliest patents have
> expired, or are about to. The combination of potentially dampened prescription
> volume and new price competition could bring a lot of disappointment to
> investors in Pfizer and its competitors.
>
> The touchiest issue is whether SSRIs provoke suicides in children. Eric Harris
> was on Solvay Pharmaceuticals' SSRI, Luvox, when he and Dylan Klebold went on
> their murder-suicide rampage through Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
> in 1999. Did the powerful drug push him into a dangerous mental zone, like the
> one Hugo experienced, or was it unable to stop what was already there? It's
> hard to know. (A Columbine survivor's lawsuit against Solvay was settled out of
> court, without any admission of liability, and resulted in a token contribution
> from Solvay to a charity.) The British health authorities have ruled that the
> side effects of SSRI antidepressants other than Prozac put children at an
> unacceptable risk of suicide. The National Institute of Mental Health in the
> U.S., in contrast, says that "some research" points to a drop in suicides among
> children since the drugs were introduced, "but it is not known if SSRIs are
> directly responsible."
>
> "The suicides under SSRIs are violent," says Vera Sharav, president of the
> Alliance for Human Research Protection, a group headquartered in New York City
> that is crusading for full disclosure of the drugs' side effects. "It's not
> like someone going into the bathroom and taking pills. It's jumping, knives,
> hanging. They're in pain. They're jumping out of their skins."
>
> Glenmullen says he himself prescribes SSRIs when appropriate but is dismayed to
> see patients who have been prescribed antidepressants for every triviality,
> from nail-biting to boyfriend breakups. It is easy to see where overprescribing
> could become a habit. General practitioners, internists and family doctors are,
> at times, penalized by health insurers for making referrals to psychiatrists.
> These first-line doctors write 73% of all antidepressant scrips in America.
> Fact: We now spend more on mood-altering drugs for our children, including
> antidepressants, than we spend on antibiotics.
>
>
>
>
> SSRI patients are also reporting memory loss. It's mostly anecdotal evidence at
> this point. But Harvard's Glenmullen says the reports of memory loss, tics and
> jerking side effects found in SSRI patients suggests to him the possibility of
> long-term brain damage. Is there a risk that, a decade hence, we will see an
> epidemic of Alzheimer's- or Parkinson's-like diseases? The regulators haven't
> given enough thought to the possibility, he says.
>
> Whatever the true hazards in SSRIs, there is no doubt that tort lawyers can
> make hay out of the situation. No overall litigation and settlement data are
> available on antidepressants (opponents claim pharma is settling cases quietly
> and sealing the records), and there are just the early signs of clustering
> activity'trial lawyers advertising for SSRI "victims," seminars and other legal
> teamwork'familiar to mass torts, but watch events gather pace.
>
> "We went through a whole period of overprescribing SSRIs," says Jeffrey
> Kodroff, a Philadelphia lawyer suing Pfizer over Neurontin, an epilepsy drug.
> "When the market started getting to the point of saturation, the market started
> emphasizing juvenile use, also for the purpose of getting patent extensions. If
> the studies show they are not only not efficacious, but cause problems, you're
> going to see a big backlash in usage of SSRIs."
>
> The New York Attorney General's suit against GlaxoSmithkline, filed in June,
> alleges that Glaxo committed fraud by suppressing or selectively quoting from
> clinical studies that showed Paxil to be no better, or even worse, than a dummy
> pill in treating children with depression. Spitzer has also requested documents
> from Forest Laboratories, maker of SSRIs Celexa and Lexapro. Glaxo says
> Spitzer's allegations are bunk; it never targeted kids.
>
> To see what a successful Spitzer prosecution could provoke, look at what
> recently happened to Pfizer. Warner-Lambert's Neurontin was FDA approved for
> epilepsy, but the company, it was alleged, was encouraging doctors to prescribe
> it for "off-label" uses like bipolar disorders. A whistle-blower triggered
> federal and state criminal investigations into the marketing, and this May
> Pfizer (which had subsequently acquired Warner-Lambert) settled with the
> government, taking a $427 million pretax hit in criminal and civil fines.
>
> Four days after the settlement the Teamsters Health & Welfare Fund of
> Philadelphia & Vicinity, joined by Aetna and the Alaska State Employees
> Association health benefits trust, filed class actions against Pfizer alleging,
> among other things, that Warner-Lambert suppressed a Harvard Bipolar Research
> Program study finding that "patients did worse on Neurontin than those who were
> on a sugar pill." Two years after the study was suppressed, the Teamsters suit
> alleges, "Neurontin accounted for $1.3 billion in sales, with over 80% of its
> use coming from nonapproved uses, such as treatment of bipolar disorder."
> Pfizer says it will "vigorously defend" itself against any suits following its
> Neurontin settlement, and says "it is worth noting that those investigations
> did not result in a charge of fraud by Warner-Lambert."
>
> A user of SSRIs for almost a decade, who says she can't wean herself off the
> drugs and spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, recently wrote her former
> Park Avenue psychiatrist: "I simply pray Glaxo follows the path of (Dow)
> Corning, who endangered women's lives with silicone implants they knew were
> dangerous. Bankruptcy."
>
> Even if Pfizer, Glaxo and Lilly are right about the science, they could be on
> the wrong end of a tort suit. Look at the breast implant cases. Scientific
> studies showed that there was no connection between silicone and the autoimmune
> diseases supposedly caused by it. But still the implant manufacturers had to
> spend billions of dollars to settle lawsuits.
Shame on you, psychiatric ARS trolls, for constantly promoting drugs like that!
Barbara Schwarz
- Next message: W_B: "Re: Bell's pasly related to wisdom tooth infection"
- Previous message: GaryG: "Re: How to Become a Christian, Version 1.01"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
