International Coalition for Drug Awareness
Educating about the dangers of Antidepressant Medications
April 5 (CBS) Amidst the billion-dollar competition to create the newest
blockbuster drug, there’s one thing worth more than all the ads money can
buy: a single positive mention in a respected medical journal. Doctors rely
so heavily on what’s printed in journals that a drug’s success or failure may
be directly affected.
April 7 (CBS) The drug company that manufactured “fen-phen,” a diet
medication linked to heart ailments, covered up problems with the drug that
emerged during Food and Drug Administration testing, a former FDA scientist
tells CBS News.
Fen-phen was removed from the market in 1997. Thousands of people who took
the drug have sued American Home Products of Madison, N.J., for health
problems they claim the drug caused.
Eli Lilly and Co., the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company that
makes Sarafem, has been marketing the new treatment with such gusto that
there are jokes about the company exhibiting obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It seems there isnt a magazine to be picked up or a channel to be surfed
that isnt running a Sarafem advertisement.
Now that the ad has run in Medscape encouraging doctors to prescribe it (as
if they needed any encouragement in their mass drugging of America!) you may
want to begin checking the obituaries for large numbers of the elderly dying.
Of course it will save the government lots of $$$ in Social Security payments!
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A US ophthalmologist says there
appears to be a very small risk that men taking the
impotence drug Viagra could suffer permanent vision
loss, but the firm that makes the drug on Friday
played down the reported threat.
Hear Dr. Ann Tracy on THE BOB DORNAN SHOW, broadcast
live at 9:00am ET, 6:00am PT, Wednesday, February 28th. For
stations in your area, or to listen via the web, at
www.bobdornan.com.
“However, the real debate has arguably not been put before the American
public with any clarity, because the extent to which the pharmaceutical
industry in the US has been able to set the policy-making agenda remains
invisible to the average voter.”
IS SEVERE PMS, or premenstrual syndrome, a mental illness? Some
pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists are treating it as one. In new
television ads, drug maker Eli Lilly is promoting the drug Sarafem to treat
the
problem, now dubbed Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). But the
pink and purple pills aren’t a new drug — they are simply repackaged
Prozac,
the popular antidepressant.
Gage Stevens might have taken his first steps that bleak morning in November
1999. And by his first birthday, he would probably have outgrown his one
persistent ailment – acid reflux. Instead, he lay in the Allegheny County,
Pa., morgue.
A lawsuit challenging the validity of the science behind mental
illness and psychotropic drugs will have repercussions for drug makers as
well as for the mental-health establishment.