Posted by Quintal on February 5, 2007, at 12:13:04
In reply to Re: Ashton Rocks! » Quintal, posted by yxibow on February 5, 2007, at 1:04:39
>Well he's entitled to his opinion too.
Of course he is, but dbc claimed he said nothing negative of Heather Ashton. That isn't true - that was my point.
>Benzo tapers should be something done as a collaborative effort between a rational psychopharmacologist and his or her patient. But that doesn't mean that it takes 2 years to get off of a few milligrams of Valium nor does it say you should drop benzodiazepines like a lead brick.
The point Jay is that very few people (hardly any in fact) have access to a psychopharmacologist in the UK. Many struggle just to get a bi-annual appointment with an frazzled, over-worked pdoc with limited resources and experience. That is the deficit that Heather Ashton tried to address in her work running benzo withdrawal clinics from 1982-1994. As I've said, when she was forced to retire by law at age 65, she wrote the Ashton Manual and provided it free on the internet so that she could continue to help people who have no access to decent support services withdraw safely and comfortably from benzodiazepines. She has no sinister motives as far as I can tell, other than those which people like to attribute to her.
>That's what I mean by trolling -- the deliberate posting of inflammatory and odd arguments to generate large amounts of waste of time posts.
Some people may find that topic interesting and stimulating. If you feel that it's a waste then don't read or post to the thread.
>Well that's fine, I didn't argue about that. The UK has always been behind with benzodiazepine dispensing.
That could be construed as a jibe against the UK being a backward country Jay. I could suggest on the contrary that the drug laws here are more progressive than those in the US; afterall benzos were once extremely popular here too. Here are a few quotes from Richard Davenport-Hines' book "The Pursuit of Oblivion: a global history of narcotics" that I think sum up the history of medical prescription of drugs of abuse in the UK quite well:
__________________________________________________"The National Health service set up in 1948 was funded by tax contributions, and physicians found it hard to refuse patients who felt that as tax-payers they were entitled to NHS drugs by right. General practitioners were paid according to the number of patients in their NHS practices. This made it hard, as a Newcastle physician regretted in 1962, to restrict prescriptions for substances like amphetamines. After requesting transfer to a doctor's list, the patient often produced a tablet and asked for a further supply. The doctor seldom refused for fear of losing a year's payment not only for the patient but also in all probability for her family. Patients only had to change doctors to get all the barbiturates and amphetamines they desired."
"In Britain during 1946 32,500 kilograms of barbiturates were sold, rising to over 40,000 kilograms in 1951. Barbiturates, for the British, reported the Daily Mirror in 1955, were 'as much a part of the daily routine for thousands as cleaning their teeth'."
"After 1960, when the clinical effectiveness of chlordiazepoxide was established, barbiturates were gradually supplanted by a new group of drugs, the benzodiazepines. Chlordiazepoxide was followed by the even more successful diazepam. Twenty-five types of benzodiazepines were available within twenty years. By the early 1980s these were the most widely used of all drugs in Britain."
"According to an estimate of 1981, 10 per cent of all British males and 20 per cent of adult females took tranquillizers or hypnotics, mainly benzodiazepines, at least once a year. Of these one-half to two-thirds took tranquillizers for at least a month at a time. Two per cent of adults, say 600,000 people, were taking tranquillizers every day or night of the year. Over 4 per cent of all prescriptions were for diazepam."
__________________________________________________>I'm not sure about the against their will part, but again I'll agree to disagree.
The original benzo addicts were similar to the people today who began taking SSRIs like Paxil in the belief that they were safer and had minimal side effects and no withdrawal symptoms compared to older meds. In other words they were mislead either through ignorance on behalf of their doctors or by deliberate deceit. They felt very angry about that and Heather Ashton supported their views and defended them against the medical profession which at that time were trying to dismiss the problems surrounding withdrawal and related problems.
>The sniping came from the person who runs the site, not how decorated this professor may be.
I really don't know what that means Jay, or what you're getting at.
Q
poster:Quintal
thread:729587
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070201/msgs/729981.html