Psychiatry's Hammer

Daily Bell
by Joel F. Wade

You know the adage: When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Psychiatry has one big hammer, psychiatric medications, with which to address a nail: psychological disorders.

Without a public that believes in and accepts the use of these medications, and the diagnoses that they presume to treat, there would be no profession of psychiatry. Many (not all; this is a critique of a system, not everybody involved) psychiatrists' entire life's work would become meaningless and their livelihood would disappear.

That's quite an incentive for confirmation bias. And now there is a push by the writers of the upcoming 5th edition of the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, to define more and more of normal human functioning as just so many nails to be struck by psychiatry's pharmaceutical hammer.

The DSM-5 is the diagnostic manual for psychology. It lists all of the psychological disorders that can be suffered by people, all in one handy little book. I've got a copy of an earlier version, from the days when I accepted medical insurance from my counseling clients and was obliged to find for them a label with which to burden them.

I say burden because there are two purposes for identifying a diagnosis. One is very good: to identify the problem so that you can treat it. If you have a bacterial infection and you can identify that this is the problem, then a course of antibiotics will usually solve that problem.

The other reason for identifying a diagnosis is very bad: to label a person, to decide who a person is and what they should accept as their fate forevermore. Once this is accomplished, you don't have to explore the problem, or get to know that person, any further.

When you label a person as "severely depressed" or "bi-polar" it has an air of certainty, a sense of having solved the mystery of that person. Then that person gets to incorporate that diagnosis into their self-concept: "I am a person who is severely depressed" or "I am a person who is bi-polar." Then what?

Then that person is supposed to accept that this is their fate. It's no different than being labeled "stupid" or "ugly." What do you do with it? Where is the solution to the problem that you've now been cleverly identified as having?

A problem without a possible solution is not a problem, it is just life. It may be very troubling, and you may wish it better; you may want to spend your life searching for a solution and you may find one. But that is different than focusing on labeling and dwelling on the problem.

If somebody finds an actual solution to a problem, then we can reassess what normal life expectations are. We do that all the time, which is why our life expectancy in the US is decades longer than it was a hundred years ago. Medical and nutritional problems have been actually solved.

At a local elementary school, there is a woman who works as a special education instructor. Her job is to diagnose kids who have learning problems. She works as a contractor, so the more kids are diagnosed, the more work she gets and the more money she makes. Guess how many kids have "learning problems" at that school? 80%!

Of course, if 80% of kids have learning problems, those aren't problems. They are by definition the normal range of human functioning. This instructor is not comparing these kids to the normal range of human functioning; she is comparing them to an idea in her mind of how they should be.

This is just like thinking that a certain person should be smarter or more attractive.

People get depressed, and they have mood swings. Some have very severe bouts of these. We desperately need to find solutions to these problems. The common knowledge nowadays is that you simply find the right psychiatric medication, or combinations of psychiatric medications, and then you take those for the rest of your life. Problem solved!

But the problem is not solved. Psychiatry depends on the theory that psychological problems are a matter of chemical imbalances in the brain. The medications, according to this theory, serve to "re-balance" that chemical imbalance.

But that is not what happens. These medications don't "balance" anything. They shift the feedback mechanism in a certain direction, changing the structure of the brain (See Robert Whitaker's important book, Anatomy of an Epidemic).

They have also, for the most part, only been tested for short-term use among adults but they are commonly prescribed for long-term use and, increasingly, for children.

What's more disturbing is that if these medications did what they were supposed to do we should see a decrease in these problems − just like we see a decrease in people dying of bacterial infections since antibiotics have been used.

But the truth is, these problems haven't just increased, they have multiplied!

These medications may be useful for some people, particularly for short-term use, but they are now widely prescribed and often for long-term use, as though they are the solution to the problem.

But the problem is much more complicated than this. Severe depression and anxiety, bi-polar, psychosis; these are all seriously debilitating conditions and they deserve the best that professionals in the field can bring in order to bring genuine relief to those suffering from them. Medication may have some benefit for some people but it is so ridiculously overprescribed that it's hard to sort out what's useful from what's not.

Another big problem is that, like that special education instructor, some people in the fields of psychiatry and psychology have been looking for problems. They have found that the normal range of human functioning is not to their liking so they just decide to label it as a problem anyway.

This brings me back to the proposed new edition of the diagnostic manual, the DSM-5.

Here are a few of the "new" diagnoses that have been proposed:

"Attenuated Psychosis Syndrome" This would have been applied to people who were at risk of developing mental illness sometime in the future. They would be given this label and "treated" with medications to manage this problem − presumably diagnosed with the help of a crystal ball and a Ouija board.

"Mixed Anxiety Depressive Disorder" This would have lowered the threshold for diagnosing people who have a mild depression and anxiety, which could include most of us at one time or another.

Perhaps most ridiculous of all is that depression immediately after a loss would be diagnosed as depressive disorder. In the past this was only diagnosed if somebody remained depressed for a prolonged period of time. But with the proposed DSM-5, you have to be up and at 'em, feeling just great right away after losing a loved one, or suffering a severe life changing event.

All of this smacks of creating problems to diagnose so that people can be appropriately labeled and medicated; but these medications do not usually solve the problem and, used long-term, can cause grave problems of their own.

There are, I understand from this article, deep ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the DSM panel members. Like my example with the special education instructor, the more problems can be labeled, the more money they can make and the more prestige they can enjoy.

But there is good news. There has been a strong backlash against this new version of the DSM, with over 13,000 professionals (including yours truly) signing an open letter objecting to these ridiculous revisions. You can sign it, too, here.

"Stupid," "ugly," "mentally disordered"... these labels do not help people to get better. They do not search for strength and resilience with which to overcome hardship or trouble. All they do is stick people with a sentence of a dysfunctional self-concept, they hobble the natural capacity for people to overcome adversity and they pound people down further with the hammer of professional arrogance.

Joel F. Wade, Ph.D. is a Life Coach who works with people around the world via phone and e-mail. He can be reached for life coaching service at jwade@drjoelwade.com or through his website, www.drjoelwade.com. He is the author of Mastering Happiness and A Pocket Guide to Mastering Happiness.

How Fukushima May Show Up in Your Sushi

Hardly reassuring. Any amount of radiation in food is dangerous.-Ed.
ABC News

Those looking for evidence of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan may need search no further than their next plate of sushi, Stanford University researchers report.

The researchers tested 15 Pacific bluefin tuna that had migrated from Japan to the California coast and found that the levels of radioactive cesium in these fish were 10 times higher than those found in bluefin tuna from the years before the disaster. Before you swear off your maguro nigiri, it’s important to realize that the levels of radiation the researchers found from the cesium in the tuna were exceedingly low — about 30 times less than the amount of radiation given off by other common, naturally occurring elements in the tuna we eat.

The findings appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The finding should be reassuring to the public,” said Timothy J. Jorgensen, associate professor of radiation medicine at Georgetown University, who was not involved with the study. “As anticipated, the tuna contained only trace levels of radioactivity that originated from Japan. These levels amounted to only a small fraction of the naturally occurring radioactivity in the tuna, and were much too small to have any impact on public health.

“Thus, there is no human health threat posed by consuming migratory tuna caught off the west coast of the United States.” Still, the fact that the researchers could trace this radioactive material back to its source in Japan could have implications for seafood monitoring methods in the future. Dr. Michael Harbut, director of the Environmental Cancer Program at Wayne State University’s Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, agreed that the findings are no cause for panic. But he said that the finding that tuna and migratory food animals could carry this radioactive material so far across the ocean deserves consideration.

“In general, when you hear the word ‘radiation’ at all, it’s cause for some alarm, and I agree always a cause for significant attention.”

Harbut, who described himself as a physician, scientist and “guy who likes sushi,” added that while the levels of radiation found should not be seen as a direct threat to human health, scientists should focus their efforts on how this extra little bit of contamination fits into the bigger picture of food safety.

“For somebody to say this is an immediate threat to large numbers of humans and their health is irresponsible,” Harbut said. “We don’t see people dying left and right all over the West Coast from radiation poisoning. But to say this is nothing to worry about is equally irresponsible, because you have radioactive material ingested by fish, which is in turn being eaten by people.”

For now, the findings may be most important as a demonstration of how migratory food animals connect different areas of the globe — and how an event in one part of the world can affect food animals in an entirely different region.

“[The findings] should be of value to both environmental studies of the marine ecosystem and to ensure that the public is not exposed to seafood contaminated with significant levels of marine radioactivity,” Jorgensen said.

Harbut said that the next step is for governments to learn more about this issue and act appropriately to ensure the seafood safety.

“I think that the appropriate government agencies have to appoint appropriately trained people to give the public an honest assessment,” Harbut said. “Not something tailor made for ignorance, like ‘This will definitely kill you,’ or ‘This poses absolutely no risk to human health.’

“We’ve gone too far in poisoning the world to settle for simple ‘yes’es and ‘no’s like that.”

Cannabis smokers show greater lung capacity and lower cancer levels than non-smokers

Natural News

For many years, the demonizing claims being made against cannabis have been crumbling as research slowly dispels them. Fifty years ago people earnestly believed that the consumption of cannabis was directly linked to the development of an array of mental illnesses, and violent and hypersexual behavior.

Medical opinion must be guided by research

But these prejudices are still hanging on. Today, an individual who responsibly informs their doctor of their marijuana use, because, as with any medicine, chemical interactions may change the resulting chemical behavior, are most frequently urged to cut back. Various reasons are given for a physicians concern. Some, who appear to have fallen behind on the research, still express concern about "brain cell damage" a remnant from the Reagan era's Just Say No campaign.

The main objection, that even the most well-informed physicians feel justified in making, is that even if cannabis itself is not particularly harmful, its most common method of ingestion, smoking, is bad for the lung tissue, regardless of the harmlessness of the substance being smoked. The belief piggybacked its way in on the back of growing opposition to tobacco, and the understanding that tobacco obstructs pulmonary flow and shortens breath.

When a chemical defined by its action doesn't act

Because some of the same chemicals, which have identifiable carcinogenic impact in cigarettes, are also found in cannabis smoke, many believe that the cancer-causing potential of cannabis is proportionate to the amount of these chemicals. The fact that cannabis contains four times more tar (or oil) than cigarettes sparked the 1990s claim that smoking a joint was as bad for the lungs as smoking four cigarettes. This extrapolation makes perfect sense at face value, but doesn't hold up when compared to actual cancer rates.

Rewriting the medical records

The results of a new government-run research program are now forcing medical authorities to overturn these beliefs. The study has been ongoing for the past twenty years, following the smoking habits of over 5000 people. Researchers found that, contrary to popular belief, smoking cannabis, does not interfere with lung function or capacity. This holds true for ongoing regular -even including daily- and long term consumption. Curiously, as a general rule, cannabis smokers had better lung function than nonsmokers, which researchers attribute to the smoking action itself, rather than the cannabis. Pot smokers inhale deeply and hold those breaths to make the most of their supply, expanding the lung's capacity.

Dr. Tashkin found that, in almost all instances, cannabis consumers had rates of cancer that were no different from those who didn't smoke cannabis. The one exception to this rule was between cannabis smokers and individuals who didn't smoke anything (including tobacco), in which marijuana smokers actually had lower levels of lung cancer.

Medical screening has over-promised and under-delivered

Evidence Network
by Alan Cassels

Medical screening over-promises and under-delivers—dragging people with no health problems into the medical system.

What could possibly be wrong with having a mammogram? Or a PSA test for prostate cancer? Even a full body CT scan? Finding the signs of illness before it strikes you down is always the best course of action — isn’t it?

You might have similar thoughts when offered a routine screening test, ultimately believing that screening for illness before it happens can only do good. So, you may be in for a shock, as I was, when I discovered how often medical screening has overpromised and under-delivered. And how frequently the “screen early, screen often” paradigm — including even simple blood tests to check for high cholesterol — can rapidly turn perfectly healthy people into patients.

Unnecessary care can be bad for your health: Prostate and breast cancer screening

Some medical screening, such as early testing for colon or cervical cancer, has a long lineage of strong evidence that it can save lives. Others, not so much.

The poster child for inappropriate and harmful screening is probably the full body CT scan, which is routinely promoted with a ‘better safe than sorry’ message that is compelling, but neither supported by independent experts or good science.

Here’s what not advertised: a full-body scan is pretty much guaranteed to find some kind of abnormality that likely won’t hurt you.

In a study published in Radiology, 86 percent of patients of 1,000 symptom-free people who underwent full body CT scans had an abnormality detected. The average person had 2.8 abnormalities revealed by the CT scan — items which appeared unusual, but either disappeared on their own or were so slow-growing that they never went on to threaten the individual.

Even for screening programs that are well-studied, such as those for breast or prostate cancers, the chances of being saved by the test are often outweighed by the possibility that the individual will be hurt by the testing or possible treatments which follow.

Yet, since most of us know someone whose life has been ‘saved’ by a test, we submit.

The PSA test, which screens a man’s blood looking for risks of prostate cancer, might seem like a no brainer for many men, especially those who have lost brothers or a father to the disease. But what most of us aren’t going to hear is that when an individual has a high PSA score (which could be caused by many things), the doctor can’t tell if the patient has the slow growing-type of prostate cancer that the majority of men eventually get (and won’t die from), or the fast-growing type that can be quickly lethal.

Here’s the data, taken from a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine: to save a single man dying from prostate cancer, 1,410 men need to be screened, and of those, 48 will undergo treatment (with chemotherapy, surgery or drugs). About 30 of the treated men will end up impotent or incontinent (a possible consequence of the treatment).

Screening can be a terribly difficult and emotional decision because many of us don’t think in terms of numbers like these. Medical screening falls under the spell of the “popularity paradox” where despite high levels of false positives for many tests (common in breast, lung and prostate cancer screening especially), people still rally behind them. We ask our friends and relatives to help raise money for ‘the cure’ and are cheerleaders for the message of early detection.

In the world of breast cancer screening, many of us know a woman who has dealt successfully with the disease, and are led to believe that early screening saved a life. The truth is that some women, even with screening, will die. And many women, without screening, will be treated successfully. What’s often not factored into the decision-making process is the potential harm incurred from the many false positives, the subsequent radiation from repeated testing, and the pain and suffering from potential biopsies and treatment.

One of the most common side effects of medical screening — the wrenching psychological impact of telling someone they may have cancer when they don’t — is rarely taken into account. And it’s significant.

The latest research for breast cancer screening, from the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care, says that you’d have to give mammograms to 2,100 women aged 40 to 49 every two years for 11 years to save one life. In the interim, screening will result in almost 700 false positives (think more testing, more x-rays and investigations) and about 75 women will have an unnecessary biopsy.

Informed decision-making the best medicine

Early screening on its own, without the evidence to back up its usefulness in saving or improving lives, is not only costly to our public health system, but may actually cause patient harm.

The principle here is that even when saving a life by screening seems the intuitive and right thing to do, it’s not a deal you should ever enter into without understanding the probabilities first — your chances of being helped or hurt by the test. Talk to your health provider, and always ask for the evidence.

Related stories:  Breast Cancer Gene Risk May Be Overstated

Flawed Pharma Study Demonizing Vitamins and Minerals Debunked

Natural Society

It seems that some people will do just about anything to get ahead, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise when a mostly falsified study is released to put down what is primarily known as a fundamentally healthy and intelligent choice. Unfortunately, people still will try to spread discord amongst their fellow man in an apparent attempt to get ahead; sacrificing the good of the people is unfortunately a small price to pay for an insurmountably large personal gain, in many cases. This dishonest act can be seen in one such case of misinformation – a ‘study’ performed in order to bring the market for multivitamins and other very respectable health supplements down a notch.

In the article Iowa Women’s Health Study, much of the piece takes many things that are widely known as beneficial within a large number of vitamin supplements, and links some of these to various deaths in which people with diseases would essentially overdose themselves on vitamins in a desperate grab to fight off the disease. The article then discounts the fact that many people do not even use vitamins except for when they are sick, wrongfully linking an absurd amount of deaths directly to the use of vitamins and other supplements. As an example, a person was diagnosed with a life threatening disease, and in a sense of sheer panic began using as much as 40 supplements all at once, going up from using literally nothing the previous day. This example was then taken out of context and used as a source of evidence that supplements are in fact potentially deadly – a completely biased and ridiculous claim!

More specifically, the amount of iron within these vitamins was under heavy fire, being dubbed the major culprit behind the high mortality rates associated with the use of supplements – not an entirely wrong accusation, but nonetheless blown vastly out of proportion compared to other very real causes of death. The article essentially throws out the fact that a great many people will attempt to reverse any disease or ailment – ranging from a common cold to stage 4 cancer – with copious amounts of supplements and vitamins and other pills that serve little purpose in the users. There are no doubts about it, using supplements and vitamins in this method is not the best or even smartest way to reap the benefits, and it is at the users fault when they misuse the vitamins themselves.

There are many discrepancies within the article itself: Many of the studied patients also used unnatural amounts of hormones found in doctor recommended supplements, as well as supplements found to have a copious amount of iron and copper in them. The study also discredited other known beneficial substances such as omega-3 fatty acids, and would instead take an absurd amount of vitamin C over just about everything else as a basis of information. This kind of bias and misinformation is what leads the public to believe in mostly anything that major ‘scientific’ studies continue to propagate.

Related stories: Why Many Vitamin Studies are Absolutely Worthless
Findings from Flawed Study Used To Discredit Multivitamin/Mineral Supplements

Media Continues Skin Cancer Scare by Vilifying Natural Sunlight, Vitamin D

Activist Post

 What is one of the biggest threats to health today according to the mainstream media? It’s not the fact that mercury is present in a wide majority of the processed food supply, or even the fact that excessive amounts of radioactive waste is now admitted to have heavily contaminated the Pacific Ocean.

No, the number one villain according to the mainstream media is natural sunlight — the very same sunlight that generates vitamin D upon coming into contact with your skin.

Vitamin D has been found to slash your risk of cancer, aid in fat loss, beat fluoride in cavity prevention, and much more. Nonetheless, it appears that the substance is quite threatening as far as the media is concerned.

The FDA continues to announce the effectiveness of sunscreen, urging consumers to get higher SPF level products — many of which contain cancer-causing chemicals that are of much greater threat than natural sunlight. In addition, sunscreen completely blocks the production of vitamin D. Is it any wonder why there has been a resurgence of the rickets?

Sun exposure, it seems, is something that is quite deadly according to the press. According to many ‘experts’ like Dr. Robin Ashinoff, chief of dermatologic and cosmetic surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center, it is important to ‘shield yourself as much as possible’ from the sun.

In fact, the doctor states that going outside with sunscreen is ‘almost as bad’ as going out without sunscreen. Surging up fear among concerned mothers worldwide (who will not allow their children out of the house without slathering them up with sunscreen and therefore causing serious childhood development problems), the doctor states:

Wearing sunscreen and then deliberately going out in the sun is almost as [bad] as going out with no sunscreen at all. You don’t get burned, but the UV rays are still getting into your skin. Sunscreen is important, but you should also wear the right clothing and shield yourself as much as possible from direct sun exposure.

Ashinoff goes on to say that when it comes to sunscreen, you should get the “highest number” you can — particularly anything above 50 SPF. Essentially, the sun is being propagated as carcinogenic threat to the entire population.

Meanwhile, the real threats lie in the sunscreen formula itself – lending reason as to why sunscreen causes cancer. Oxybenzone and other vague mystery chemicals are commonly placed in many brand-name sunscreens, with many such chemicals yet to be proven as safe to use at all. About 8 percent of all sunscreens have been quality tested by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) to be both safe and effective for the intended use, whereas the other 92 percent contain at least one (if not many more) of the ingredients designated as detrimental for human use.

Scientists Recommend Dangerous Antipsychotic Drugs to Treat Cancer

Activist Post

The Obama administration recently announced that the US government will assist pharmaceutical corporations in finding prescription drugs to treat new diseases.

The focus of this collaboration will identify new uses for drugs that have already been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"We need to speed the pace at which we are turning discoveries into better health outcomes,” said Dr. Francis Collins, of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “NIH looks forward to working with our partners in industry and academia to tackle an urgent need that is beyond the scope of any one organization or sector.”

Obama signed Executive Order (EO), Establishing the National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council in 2010.

Now the medical journal Cell has published a research paper on using an extremely dangerous psychotropic pharmaceutical to treat cancer; one that has traditionally been used to treat schizophrenia.

Scientists are claiming that according to their extensive research, which consisted of analyzing thousands of different drugs to determine if they possessed anti-cancer effects, it is Thiroridazine -- a “last resort” drug for schizophrenics -- that is now purported to kill cancer stem cells.

Thioridazine is expected to be used to select and eradicate cancer stem cells that are found in leukemia and several other cancers such as breast, blood, brain, prostate, ovarian, lung and gastrointestinal.

Scientists claim that this hazardous pharmaceutical can be administered in cancer therapies, without the health-threatening side effects of current drugs on the market. It is being advertised as an alternative to chemotherapy and radiation.

A robotic stem cell screening system was devised by the research team to siphon through large amounts of drugs and previously unpublished data and drugs that are available on the market today. Thousands of chemical compounds were screened for potential effects on specifically breast cancer and leukemia.

“We discovered the drug by creating a new way of looking at different chemicals,” said Mick Bhatia, the principal investigator for the study and scientific director of McMaster’s Stem Cell and Cancer Research Institute in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.

In order to do that, we have to put cancer stem cells in a dish, but also have normal stem cells to also test the compounds. We were able to do this with a robotic system, fully automated, that allowed us to go through 10 or 15 compounds [at first]. Now we can do this with thousands of compounds, eventually arriving at this drug that doesn’t do anything to normal stem cells, but kills cancer stem cells.

The unusual aspect of our finding is the way this human-ready drug actually kills cancer stem cells; by changing them into cells that are non-cancerous.

The praise Thioridazine is receiving omits the dangerous effects that this drug causes in humans.

Vomiting
Seizures
Ulcers
Urinary tract infections
Swelling
Slowed movements
Inability to produce facial expressions
Parkinson’s disease
Irregular heart beat
Sudden death

Thioridazine is classified as a conventional antipsychotic. Its prime function is to reduce the brain’s ability to process excitement; effectively rendering the patient docile and even-tempered.

There is a strong possibility of committing suicide while on this drug.

Bhatia’s study asserts that this discovery could inspire a new frontier in cancer therapies. He stated that there are an estimated 12 existing drugs that pose a “good potential for the same response.”

The researchers are not stopping with Thioridazine; they are moving onto other possible uses for already approved drugs.

Bhatia’s team is anxious to begin human trials with plans to use this pharmaceutical on leukemia patients. By studying patients whose cancer is in remission, the researchers hope to find that thioridazine will prevent a multitude of cancers.

Currently, the vitamin industries, by order of the Codex Alimentarius (CA) are being attacked by the US government to justify the force outlawing of natural medicine use. The CA is a creation of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The findings of this study are just the first of many “new uses” that the pharmaceutical industry will “discover” in order to utilize antipsychotic drugs to treat major diseases.

With the support of the Obama administration, soon we may all be on some kind of psychotropic drug.