Category Archives: Health issues

Wish Pharma’s market was depressed

A new report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics shows that over a 10-year period, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed across the United States by a staggering 400 percent — as the numbers of those diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (the clinical name for depression) and anxiety disorders has dramatically increased.

With the development of Prozac and similar drugs, more than one out of every 10 Americans over the age of 12 now takes an antidepressant, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed data collected from 12,637 people who participated in the center’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, which elicit information from about 5,000 Americans of all ages every year. Antidepressants were the third most common prescription drug taken by Americans of all ages in 2005–2008 and the most frequently used by persons aged 18–44 years. The nearly quadruple rate of antidepressant use was from 1988–1994 through 2005–2008.

Overall, women are more than twice as likely as men to take an antidepressant, the analysis reveals. The biggest users are women ages 40 to 59, with 23 percent of that group using an antidepressant. Among males and females ages 12 to 17, 3.7 percent take an antidepressant, compared with 6.1 percent of those ages 18 to 39, 15.9 percent of those 40 to 59, and 14.5 percent of those 60 and older.

Whites use antidepressants more commonly than anyone else, the surveys show. Fourteen percent of whites take an antidepressant, compared with 4 percent of blacks and 3 percent of Mexican-Americans. About 14 percent of Americans who take an antidepressant have been doing so for at least 10 years. More than 60 percent have been taking it for more than two years.

The CDC noted that about eight percent of Americans over age 12 with no current depression symptoms take the drugs for other reasons. And less than one-third of Americans taking one antidepressant and less than half of those taking multiple antidepressants had seen a “mental health professional” in the previous year. The surveys also discovered that there is no difference by income in the prevalence of antidepressant usage.

Read the rest: CDC: Antidepressant Use Up 400% in Past Decade.

Part of the reason is that the people who have the power to affect the content of the DSM are themselves in a profitable relationship with Big Pharma. For more, see this documentary, Generation RX.

 

Exercise: bad news and good news

Perhaps just as important, bear in mind that exercise has benefits beyond weight reduction. In the study of obese people who took up exercise, most became notably healthier, increasing their aerobic capacity, decreasing their blood pressure and resting heart rates, and, the authors write, achieving “an acute exercise-induced increase in positive mood,” leading the authors to conclude that, “significant and meaningful health benefits can be achieved even in the presence of lower than expected exercise-induced weight loss.”

via Phys Ed: Why Doesn’t Exercise Lead to Weight Loss? – Well Blog – NYTimes.com.

I’ve noticed this admission over and over in mainstream sources–the same sources that otherwise make one think that weight loss is the only way to get these health benefits.

The voice of death panel

YouTube – Robert Reich: What An Honest President Would Say About Health Reform.

Pretty interesting.  Here we have the whole collection:

  • President as national Savior
  • Burdening the young and independent in the name of the collective good.
  • Killing people in the name of the collective good (withholding medicine they could pay for themselves in a free society)
  • Using unconstitutional government influence in the economy to further weaken an industry.
  • Openly announcing the end of scientific progress.
  • Openly announcing the end of progress in longevity.
  • An ego that admires itself for its willingness to wish for death and destruction and makes such “courage” the sign of intellect and integrity.

Does anyone remember when “health reform” was supposed to actually help people.  What is better about this?

Do people die now from lack of health care?  “Well, we need more of them to die, just preferably the older non-taxpaying.  We plan to harvest the economic output of the young and health until they are used up.” That is compassion?  That is a solution to problems?  I thought the problem was that people were not getting care.  Now it is that we want to choose who lives and who dies when?

Is too much money going into expensive and “unnecessary” drugs?  Well, duh, give us back our freedom and get rid of the lawyers paradise monopolies of patents and intellectual property.  Monopolies produce all sorts of problems and these are all completely the result of insane grants by governments to corporations.

The bottom line is laissez-faire. Leave us alone.  Get away from medicine and welfare.  Let charities and savings deal with the elderly instead of your bureaucrats and your taxes and your increasingly burdensome regulations.  Your subsidies make prices skyrocket so you can pretend to save us with price controls.

The United States Government is nothing but a Death Panel.  Reich just wants to get there quicker, but this nations is, in principle, already an extermination camp.  The only question is when they role out the barbed wire and where they build the furnaces.  The political realities have already been set.

Parents aren’t fools; and the Pols are only pushing harder

As the first wave of swine flu vaccine crosses the country, more than a third of parents don’t want their kids vaccinated, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll.

Some parents say they are concerned about side effects from the new vaccine — even though nothing serious has turned up in tests so far — while others say swine flu doesn’t amount to any greater health threat than seasonal flu.

Jackie Shea of Newtown, Conn., the mother of a 5-year-old boy named Emmett, says the vaccine is too new and too untested.

“I will not be first in line in October to get him vaccinated,” she said in an interview last month. “We’re talking about putting an unknown into him. I can’t do that.”

Read the rest: A third of parents oppose swine flu vaccine – Swine flu- msnbc.com.

The big delusion is that entrepreneurs want a free market.  Entrepreneurs want an exclusive opportunity.  For Big Pharma, that means getting the government to force drugs on the populace so they have mandatory customers.

Like the Nobel Peace Prize and the idea of houses as investments rather than depreciating assets, the reputation of our “Health and Welfare” corruptocrats is another bubble that may soon deflate.

Food: The Rebuttal

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance. Enough, enough, enough.

Read the rest at The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals — The American, A Magazine of Ideas.

Deaths caused by hospital mistakes ‘up 60 per cent in two years’ – Telegraph

I love the last line:

Roger Goss, from the pressure group Patient Concern, told the newspaper: “Patients are already extremely nervous when they have to go to hospital, so they need this news like a hole in the head.”

via Deaths caused by hospital mistakes ‘up 60 per cent in two years’ – Telegraph.

Everything immitates the economy where, instead of being broke and overleveraged, we are supposedly lacking in confidence.  No, it is not the “news” that the patients don’t need; they don’t need deficient and deadly hospital care.

William McGurn: Like a Virgin–The Press Take On Teenage Sex – WSJ.com

The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don’t. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

“Virginity Pledges Don’t Stop Teen Sex,” screams CBS News. “Virginity pledges don’t mean much,” adds CNN. “Study questions virginity pledges,” says the Chicago Tribune. “Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds,” heralds the Washington Post. “Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data,” reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: “Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study.”

Here’s the rub: It just isn’t true.

In fact, the only way the study’s author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called “Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers,” and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that “virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general — a fact that many media reports have missed cold.”

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

– These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

– These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

– These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

– When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 — compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

– And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste — amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let’s put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: “Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge.”

via William McGurn: Like a Virgin – The Press Take On Teenage Sex – WSJ.com.

There’s more to the article.  For the record, I was ready to accept the whole thing.  Since I oppose public education on general principles I don’t feel that loyal to a curricullum, even if I happen to adopt the premise in my own teaching.  So it was somewhat difficult to realize I’d been gullible.  Live and learn.

Eugenics is not possible, it appears

I found this post by a self-confessed Asperger’s sufferer really interesting, though I’m not sure I understand it all. Here’s a snip:

I believe it runs in my family somehow, but I got all the negative aspects of it. My oldest brother has an extremely high IQ, my youngest brother has an incredible capacity for creativity. My middle brother has a unique ability to spot anything different that most human eyes overlook. For example, standing in a yard of clover, he will find every 4-leaf clover there is to find in record time. Me? what did I get? The famous autistic traits of inability to connect to others and obsessive compulsive disorder. Break my routine and I throw a fit. Take me to a public place and I spaz out. My family chalked it up to extreme shyness. Some doctors said it was depression or ADD. I’ve even been asked repeatedly if I’ve ever been abused. Even when my elementary school teacher showed concern because I was more involved with organizing the pencils on my desk in a certain order than I was with participating in class, my parents chose to ignore the signs, whether out of fear or ignorance I dont know. Even if they hadn’t ignored the signs, what could they really do? What I do know is that, yes, I love my family very much. However, I do not have a connected feeling with anyone on the planet.

She ends by endorsing a possible cure or therapy for allergy-related autism.