Psycho-Babble Medication | about biological treatments | Framed
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the real issue » linkadge

Posted by crabwalk on March 10, 2007, at 15:02:09

In reply to Re: Please be civil » madeline, posted by linkadge on March 10, 2007, at 13:29:02

> I'm not saying they don't help some people, I'm just agreeing that they can really hurt some people.
>
> Linkadge

In my view the issue with ad's comes down to this argument. The stats show that a good number of people do well on them. They also show adverse reactions. What they don't show is the severity or perseverance of these reactions -- there is pretty much no such measurement of long-term effects of these drugs.

So two questions arise...One is how often are people pretty much screwed over (meaning severely reducing quality of life, I'm one of them at this point) by these drugs? It's probably a relatively small number because the number of people taking ad's is astronomical, but assuredly the suffering and loss of these people is devastating and is not at all mollified by the fact that others are lucky enough to escape such suffering.

This then leads to the second question, which is how many people does it take to get screwed over before the whole practice of prescribing these drugs becomes unjustifiable? This is a moral issue, like asking is it right to steal bread to feed your starving family, i.e. there's no easy answer. However, the bioethical foundation of health care was laid down in the 20th century expressly says that no suffering is justifiable in the name of a statistical majority. Of course, the flip side is if we deprive people of drugs that may help them, how do we measure their suffering?

I've struggled with this issue for years now, since I realized that prozac had done what Linkadge has described -- caused possibly permanent anhedonia. I think the people this happens to automatically point the finger at psychiatry as a practice and some go as far as to say it's thoroughly evil. As a sufferer, I've definitely felt the same things at times, but unfortunately I think the issue is more complicated. While there are definitely some victims of malpractice and ignorance in the name of convenience or even profit, I think the majority of damage done by ad's is a combination of bad luck and selective ignorance. The luck part is obviously uncontrollable, the ignorance part oppositely, and inexcusably, so. So, I think the FDA and doctors have seriously dropped the ball in evaluating long-term safety of ad's. This has created a general perception that they are almost infallible, and it will take a long time for anyone to go against this. When people realize the subtle yet devastating dangers of ad's, a paradigm shift will occur, and those moral questions will be at the heart of it, I hope. I also hope it will happen in my lifetime, but I'm not sure that it will.

Wow, that was long. I'd appreciate any feedback...


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Psycho-Babble Medication | Framed

poster:crabwalk thread:739762
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20070308/msgs/739912.html