Posted by Alan on February 15, 2002, at 0:54:41
In reply to Yvonne Day, posted by christophrejmc on February 14, 2002, at 22:04:41
Yvonne Day is also involved with various anti-benzodiazepine (and anti-psychiatric medication) groups such as http://www.benzo.org.uk. This doesn't invalidate anything she says (or anything on the website), but it's important to know all the facts. Although a lot of their advice may be helpful, I feel that they tend to exaggerate and rely on scare tactics.
*******************************************Here we go again with the anti-benzo zealots and their scare tactics. These strident minority groups which are mainly political and moralistic (rather than medical) in nature, using hyperbole, half-truths and innuendo are ones to be watched out for.
The constant usage of the term "addiction" as a pejorative when the term "medical dependence" is more appropriate for BZD usage isn't even on their radar screen. "Detox" is their battle cry calling BZD's neurotoxins and treating patients as if they are illicit drug users and lumping them in with poly drug abusers taking heroin and cocaine - even claiming falsely that tapering BZD's is the same "hell" as detoxing from these narcotics...and that after stopping BZD's the original anxiety is 10X's (or is that 100X's? - keeps changing) worse than before.
They have influenced NHS policy in the UK, Canada, and Australia to the anxiety suffer's detriment by taking the freedom of choice away from the patient/doctor relationship to use what they know works.
It is an insideous problem that needs to be addressed head on. They scare people needlessly stigmatising the use of these meds and provoking guilt about taking them from the anxiety sufferer that is being helped by them in the first place and those considering taking a med that could easily turn their life around for the better.
They are well known in the community of pdocs that specalise in the treatment of chronic anxiety disorders and are referred to in cult-like status.
There is so little understanding of these meds by many modern day pdocs that it takes a great stroke of luck or heavy duty searching to find one that is well educated about them to not cause more harm by witholding BZD's as a last resort instead of giving the patient freedom of choice to try them on equal footing with the ssri's.
On top of that there's a tremendous push by the pharms. to have as many docs as possible give the most medicine as possibe from the ssri catagory to recover R&D investment and to claim no withdrawl efffect (like the BZD's do, they imply). Coming to find out that ALL meds have withdrawl effects that must be moderated by slow withdrawl including the antiepileptics, antihypertensives, ssri's etc, etc.
One of the biggest frauds going on in psychiatric medicine today - the trashing of BZD's and similar.
Alan
poster:Alan
thread:93431
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020208/msgs/94209.html