by Kieron McFadden
There have been many scandals concerning the dangers of prescription drugs recently and few people are unaware that prescription drugs can be deadly. Why then are we dishing them out to our kids with such reckless abandon?
Tragically for many of our children we have been slow to appreciate that drugs being administered to children are every bit as damaging, dangerous and sometimes deadly – and even more so – than those inflicted on adults.
This is not just me saying this of course. Various citizens’ watchdog organisations have laboured long and hard to alert the public and, often in vain, to get government to do something to protect its young citizens.
According to a report issued as long ago as May 2006, by no less than the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the side effects and "problems" with drugs widely prescribed for so-called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were sending even then 3,100 people to the ER every year and a staggering 80 percent of these were children.
These "problems" most often include overdosing or accidental mis-use, and side effects that include chest pain, high blood pressure, rapid heart rate, strokes and sudden death.
Between 1999 and 2003, 25 deaths linked to ADHD drugs were reported to the FDA, and 19 of these involved children. Moreover, there were 54 cases of other serious heart problems.
Of course the problems that wind up in the ER or the morgue are the most serious side effects of such medications and these figures do not take into account the more gradual and insidious damage to the brain and nervous system done by long-term use of the dugs – for when one gives a child a drug one is essentially entering a poison into his system.
There are other problems and complications too. Virtually all the murderous schoolyard rampages that have become all too familiar were perpetrated by kids on drugs such as those prescribed for ADHD. And now there seems to be emerging evidence that one drug that psychiatrists frequently prescribe off-label to “treat ADHD” is causing boys and young men to grow breasts!
So widespread has the medical community’s penchant for doping our children become (and once upon a time we reserved doping for our livestock and pets) an alarming 3.3 million kids in America alone who are 19 years old or younger, and 1.5 million young American adults who are twenty and older, are currently taking ADHD drugs. With those numbers constantly rising, we can assume that the number of ADHD-drug-related illnesses, addictions, complications, hospitalizations, fatalities and other tragedies will also continue to increase.
The justification put forth by psychiatry – without any evidence – is that we are seeing an inexplicable epidemic of a brain disorder known as ADHD, some kind of chemical imbalance that can only be rectified by “readjusting” brain chemistry with drugs. From whence comes this brain disorder all of a sudden? What is causing so many millions of young brains to become defective? This has yet to be explained, proven, established or otherwise shown to be more than a marketing ploy that is selling a heck of a lot of very expensive drugs.
We, or at least certain sectors of the medical establishment, seem to have become completely drug-happy, just itching to reach for the prescription pad and the pill bottle rather than provide care that requires some communication or hard work or even a knowledge of nutrition. We are sacrificing our young on altars of corporate greed erected on the quicksand of least-effort and let’s-not-bother.
Drug-“happy” is perhaps a misnomer. Drug-crazy is probably more apt because there is little that is “happy” about it. All this drugging has achieved nothing but produce a society that is more degraded, atomised, miserable and demoralised and a youth that is less bright and able than was the case before we let psychiatry loose upon our people. And the ADHD drugging has done nothing to reverse what, we are told, is an increasing problem with hyperactivity in our kids. Indeed we have inherited more child suicides, with kids as young as eight killing themselves, as was the case recently in Florida, more delinquency and more schoolyard rampages. So, all that drugging and all that damage have been for nothing.
While all this is going on and the problems and fatalities associated with ADHD drugs mount up, we wait as usual in vain for our governments, through organisations such as the FDA in the United States and its counterparts in other countries, to do something effective about all this, something to protect our children, something to uphold the right to good health of all citizens, something to make psychiatry and the drugs industry behave with something resembling a sense of responsibility.
And by effective I mean effective, not just making the right noises or forming committees so they can look as if they are doing something. After all, there must be some reason we are paying them so much money through our taxes.
It is unacceptable that the manufacturers, psychiatrists and other medical professionals involved in persuading people to take these drugs “don’t know” about their side effects. How could they not know something so crucial to the health of their patients?
Likewise it is unacceptable that medical professionals “do not know” the manifold dietary influences that can cause the symptoms of ADHD and the safe nutritional handlings that are available and which avoid any need to dose our kids with harmful drugs. If it is known by the millions of interested laymen, nutritionists, dieticians and the many conscientious doctors that, thankfully, are around and so forth, then we have a right to expect that the guy reaching so readily for the prescription pad takes the trouble to get himself similarly educated. Or are our kids not worth the effort?
Okay, so debunking the whole ADHD mental disorder scam and switching to safe, effective nutritional handlings so as to render our children in good shape may deprive the psycho-pharmacy of its profits.
Well, boo hoo.
