I suspect I am one of those people it's fine to ask. Please don't feel like you need to hide. I have no problem explaining why I have such a hard time with them.

First, meds work for people. No doubt about that. They have worked for me. I just needed to say that.

Pharma companies have a built in conflict of interest which is loyalty to their stockholders from providing medicine to sick people. It is one of the worst conflicts. When you or someone you care about is sick and the medicine is available but super expensive, what do you do? You pay for it with whatever means available.

If you think they don't influence FDA rules or the APA you are not seeing things clearly. DSM 3 changed everything by making pdocs responsible for prescriptions. This was in the late 70's. Pdocs needed something to separate themselves from psychologists. There are actual letters discussing the marketing shift from DSM 3-4.

Pharma spends billions on marketing every year to sell their branded drug. TV ads and internet ads that follow you around are designed to get the consumer to tell the doctor what they want. And it works! Lots of doctors, more then you might think, comply without a lot of thought. Doctors get speaking and research funding if they prescribe their branded product. Patients get coupons if they can't afford it. They aren't being charitable. Abilify is one of the most successful meds ever. Part of that is giving away so many coupons. The coupons are actually a war on the insurance companies, btw.

I have to say researchers employed by big pharma for the most part retain their ethics. It is the marketing arm that really is the part that does the most damage. Gosh, I wish I could remember the story completely... One of the pioneers in advertising came up with the idea of making a "want" into a "desire". He was freud's son.

Time and time again there are studies on herbal treatments that we never hear about because they don't get big pharma capital. Why on earth would they pay for something they can't make a profit on? So we completely miss out on potential treatments that are a lot safer and less expensive. Did you know there has been a double blind study on chamomile? Quality German chamomile should just be in you med cabinet it is so helpful for so many things. There is promising studies on lavender as well and a pill approved in Germany for anxiety. If you want to buy it you have to go through amazon.de.

(Sigh) I want to go on but I'm tired. I may edit this tomorrow. I really recommend Robert Whitaker's anatomy of an epidemic. It's actually a fast read despite it's length. He does a much better job then I can. It is also very well referenced. When I was reading it I had all these people telling me it was pseudoscience so I looked up a lot of the references and found them to be reliable. The bottom line is we are being sold misleading information in order to sell product. As a result we have a highly malfunctioning system of care which isn't very effective and is unnecessarily expensive.



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