Chemical child abuse

In my view, this exploitation of young children for drug testing amounts to nothing less than chemical child abuse. What possible medical justification could these doctors, hospital staff and drug pushers have for prescribing mind-altering drugs to four-year-olds? Even the "disease" being treated here is entirely fictional. So-called "bi-polar disorder" was wholly invented by psychiatrists with strong financial ties to drug companies. The purpose of this disease is not to help children, but to sell drugs to anyone and everyone, including toddlers.

I often wonder when the rest of the country will wake up and notice that the mass-drugging of our nation's children has gone too far. Why isn't the mainstream media giving this front-page coverage? Why aren't lawmakers demanding an end to the chemical abuse of our children? Why isn't the FDA halting these trials on toddlers out of plain decency?

You already know the answer: Because they're all making money from this chemical assault on our nation's children. The doctors, hospitals, drug companies, psychiatrists and mainstream media all profit handsomely from the sales of mind-altering drugs to children. Ethics will never get in the way of old-fashioned greed, even when we're talking about the health and lives of four-year-olds.

Modern psychiatry, with all its false authority, drugging of children and rampant disease mongering, is an affront to all people who believe in honest medical science and basic human decency. Armed with the DSM-IV, on-the-take psychiatrists invent diseases out of thin air (like "bi-polar disorder"), then vote official treatment protocols into the reference books. Yet a recent review of such decision panels reveals that one hundred percent of the psychiatrists and doctors involved in such decisions have financial ties to the drug companies that coincidentally happen to manufacture the recommended drugs.

This is a life-threatening scandal of such proportion that it deserves a Dept. of Justice investigation, complete with criminal charges being brought against many of these so-called "doctors." To characterize this as a crime against humanity is not an exaggeration.

Blatant quackery

Let's face it: Modern psychiatry and its incessant disease mongering amounts to quackery at its worst. This group both invents the diseases, then hawks the snake oil that "treats" those diseases. And underneath it all, there's absolutely no physiological evidence of any such diseases at all. They can be diagnosed in children on a whim, based on a mere sixty seconds of casual observation combined with the biased opinion of a drug-pushing psychiatrist being bribed by Big Pharma.

This is not medicine, folks. And it's certainly not science. It's just plain medical fraud. Yet the whole of conventional medicine goes along with it, pretending that nothing is amiss. Doctors, hospitals, FDA bureaucrats, teachers and even many parents just pretend that all these mysterious brain chemistry diseases have spontaneously appeared in the world over the last ten years, suddenly afflicting tens of millions of children. And thank goodness the drug companies just happened to have invented all these treatment drugs at the exact same moment in history when these psychiatric diseases became so widespread! Imagine the odds...

Where are the skeptics on this issue? Where are the quack busters on the drugging of our children? The silence is deafening. They have nothing to say about the lack of science behind psychiatric disease mongering. They aren't skeptical at all. Clear thinking, it seems, isn't allowed when the conclusions might question the institutions of modern medicine. And thus, the skeptics reveal themselves as little more than purveyors of medical dogma; protectors of a drug-the-children medical cult that demands unquestioning obedience to its profit-minded beliefs.

Good science has long since left psychiatry. And if you want to know the true, horrifying history of the mental health industry, visit the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights. Prepare to be shocked.

Born psychotic

Psychiatry believes there is no child too young to diagnose as having psychiatric disorders. It won't be long before psychiatrists will be hanging out in delivery rooms, declaring children to be mentally diseased at birth (because they keep crying, obviously) and immediately injected with powerful mind-altering drugs. To psychiatry, human life has no value other than the possibility of creating a new paying customer, and every new birth is seen as another opportunity for dispensing profitable drugs.

There's no end to the evil that psychiatry might do in the years ahead. As long as society continues to give psychiatrists carte blanche to invent fictitious diseases, there is no human behavior, emotion or condition that's safe from being labeled a pathology. So-called "adult ADHD screening tests" label a whopping 80 percent of participants with the disease. Behavioral disorders screenings for children demonstrate similar numbers. And the things that can get you labeled as "diseased" are all too mundane: Feeling overwhelmed, feeling distracted by modern life, handling too many projects as once, being afraid of public speaking, feeling shy in social situations... gee, is there anyone who doesn't experience these sooner or later?

But it wasn't enough to attempt to drug up all the adults, you see. Modern psychiatry had to expand its markets, and that meant reaching younger and younger "customers." A couple of decades ago, they started drugging teens with antidepressant drugs. Then they attacked younger schoolchildren with Ritalin. Now they're targeting preschoolers, and the trend is clear: Children will soon be "born psychotic" if psychiatry has anything to do with it.

Years ago, the giant soda companies handed out baby bottles emblazed with the logos of their flagship soft drink products. The idea was to get mothers to feed their infants soda instead of infant formula, thereby altering the taste of the infant for life, creating a lifelong consumer of soft drinks. When I first uncovered this disturbing report, I thought it was perhaps the most evil thing a corporation could do to the health of infants. But now, psychiatry takes the prize.

Using four-year-olds as guinea pigs to test psychotropic drugs is more than merely unethical; it's predatory. It's Nazi-esque in its use of human beings for medical experiments, and yet it remains strangely acceptable across society. Child Protective Services does nothing. Hospitals gladly run the trials (they get paid, of course). Psychiatrists and doctors happily drug these children, observe them, then draw their blood, all in the name of corporate profits. And thus, they all join the long and sordid history of human medical experimentation that demonstrates ethics, or human lives, or plain decency will never get in the way of the forward march of medicine.

The complicity of conventional medicine is astounding. The American Medical Association, to my knowledge, says nothing skeptical about disease mongering by psychiatry. Few doctors see any problem at all, and fewer still have the courage to speak out. The FDA, which is supposed to protect people, gladly approves one psychotropic drug after another, even for use on toddlers. Lawmakers take campaign finance contributions from drug companies and look the other way, and the mainstream media continues publicizing fictitious diseases, lending them false credibility and creating customer demand for dangerous drugs.

Only a handful of doctors, authors, organizations and celebrities dare tell the truth on this issue, and they are singled out for incessant ridicule. Take Tom Cruise, for example. Although he speaks the truth about the drugging of children, he is endlessly dragged through the mud of public opinion simply because he expresses authentic passion for ending this chemical child abuse. Cruise should be applauded for his efforts, not ridiculed.

Let's hospitalize the psychiatrists

When it comes to mental health, there is one group of people in this country that truly needs to be drugged: The psychiatrists. Because to practice psychiatry today, and to support the mass drugging of toddlers and schoolchildren, is to demonstrate a deep-rooted madness that may justify chemical restraint. To drug toddlers, or to use them for medical experiments, should be rightly regarded as a crime. And there's no question whatsoever that the children of our nation would be safer, healthier and happier if the practice of modern psychiatry simply disappeared.

Besides, the real cause of depression, mood swings, emotional disorders or other so-called "diseases" mostly comes down to diet and lifestyle. Remove the food additives and refined sugars from a child's diet, and he returns to normal in about two weeks. Feed children healthy oils, live foods, whole grains and superfoods, and you automatically create energetic, curious, fast-learning children who need no drugs. Give children some sunshine, play time and some time with nature, and you get balanced, healthy children. It's no secret, it's just common sense.

But psychiatry has no common sense, and no one in the industry dares mention that most so-called mental disorders are really just caused by nutritional imbalances. Because to admit to the truth about the mental health of children would be to render their careers irrelevant. And no psychiatrist is going to commit career suicide by admitting that bi-polar disorder was just made up, or that toddlers need good food, not expensive drugs. Just like conventional doctors, psychiatrists have to protect their egos and revenue streams, and that means convincing parents that little Johnny has a brain chemistry imbalance and he'll have to take psychotropic drugs for life. The parents, as gullible as ever, naively go along with the scam, usually after being frightened into compliance by a psychiatrist who warns them what might happy to little Johnny of they don't drug him. "He might commit suicide," they're sternly warned.

Will the scams of modern medicine never cease? Is there no child too young to be targeted for medical experiments? Will the sinister desire for Big Pharma profits ever be balanced against basic human decency?

Probably not. The world has, indeed, gone half mad. And psychiatry is standing by, ready to drug everyone, regardless of their age or mental health status.

Merck officials said last week that data from a follow-up of patients a year after they stopped taking Vioxx showed heart and stroke risk ended soon after patients stopped taking it - and that patients who later had such complications didn't have a legitimate lawsuit. But several doctors told The Associated Press they believe the data instead showed the heart and stroke risks persisted for at least a year.

The newly public data show the increased cardiovascular risk with Vioxx use likely begins as early as four to six months and then gets bigger, said Dr. Steven Nissen, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist who heads a huge international study of painkiller safety.

"It didn't really make a lot of sense that nothing happened for 18 months and then all of a sudden you would see a hazard," Nissen said Thursday.

Other doctors concurred.

Because few heart attacks and strokes occurred, Nissen said scientists can't definitively say the painkiller caused the excess complications in the Vioxx group compared to those in the placebo group, but most would interpret it that way.

"There's no 18-month delay until you see harm," said Dr. Curt Furberg, professor of public health science at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

"This has implications for patients and all the legal cases that are under way," he said, adding, "You're probably at risk the rest of your life."

The study, known by the acronym APPROVe, included 2,586 patients, with half taking Vioxx and half dummy pills for three years. Patients were enrolled from February 2000 to November 2001.

By September 2004, Merck said, the Vioxx group had about twice as many heart attacks and strokes, leading the Whitehouse Station, N.J.-based company to pull the drug from the market then. As lawsuits over Vioxx have topped the 11,500 mark, Merck has insisted there was no increased risk until 18 months - a key argument in its legal strategy.

"The new APPROVe data do not establish that the risk for Vioxx starts earlier than had been previously reported," Merck repeated Thursday in a statement. Merck declined to provide a company official to answer questions on the record.

When the company first published APPROVe data, in February 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine, it only included complications patients had within 14 days of stopping the drug, even if they stopped early. A key graph in that report didn't show higher risk until after 18 months.

The lead author of that report, Dr. Robert Bresalier of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, told The Associated Press he is still reviewing the new data but doesn't think the data show that Vioxx risk began earlier. He said the original and new graphs look about the same.

Still, that's not the proper way to report studies, said Dr. Alastair Wood, professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. He said that method would exclude complications suffered by patients who stopped taking Vioxx early because of side effects such as rising blood pressure, then had a heart attack more than two weeks later.

If Merck knowingly excluded those complications, he said, "that's outrageous."

"It's a 'let's hope the referee isn't looking' kind of thing," Wood said.

The complete data follow about 85 percent of patients throughout the full study, producing a different picture.

A key graph and two related tables in the 108-page report, which Merck supplied to The Associated Press, seem to indicate that within three or four months, a higher risk of heart complications began for patients on Vioxx. The tables show that over the first six months, the Vioxx group had about a 60 percent higher chance of having a heart attack or stroke.

The risk to the Vioxx group bounces around over the following months, as is common in clinical studies with small numbers of complications, then rises after 18 months' use.

Merck has submitted the report to the Food and Drug Administration, which has said it is reviewing the new data. A spokeswoman did not return messages Thursday.

Of the six Vioxx lawsuits that have reached verdicts, Merck has lost three.

In trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Merck shares rose 79 cents to $35.13, as a panel of federal advisers recommended approval of the company's vaccine against cervical cancer, but shares fell 13 cents in after-hours trading.

The rise in the toll here -- the second highest since 2003 after Vietnam -- comes as WHO investigators have yet to rule out that human-to-human transmission occurred in a cluster of five deaths among relatives in North Sumatra.

I Nyoman Kandun, director for the health ministry's communicable disease control centre, said one of the deaths was a 10-year-old boy who was the fifth confirmed fatality in the cluster.

He said that another boy had been confirmed by the WHO as dying of the deadly H5N1 strain in Bekasi, a suburb on the outskirts of Jakarta.

"He was a 12-year-old male. We suspect it was from backyard chickens," he told AFP Friday. The boy died on Sunday.

The 10-year-old fatality was the nephew of a 37-year-old woman believed to have been the initial victim of the virus in the village of Kubu Sembelang in Karo district, North Sumatra.

She died of respiratory disease on May 4 and was buried before tissue samples were taken, the WHO said in a statement dated Thursday.

The women's two sons aged 17 and 19 also died, as did her 28-year-old sister and that woman's 18-month-old daughter.

A 25-year-old brother of the initial case has been confirmed as carrying the virus but remains alive, while another family member hospitalised on suspicion of infection has been cleared, the WHO said.

The cluster -- Indonesia's largest to date -- raised fears of the possibility of human-to-human transmission.

The WHO said in its statement that the likely source of infection for the additional cases had not yet been determined but that the cases had all participated in a family gathering around April 29.

"The possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out at present... (but) if human-to-human transmission has occurred, it has not been either efficient or sustained," it said.

Indonesia has witnessed more bird flu deaths than any other country this year. It has the world's second highest number of fatalities since 2003, after Vietnam. Nine Indonesians who were infected have survived.

Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono warned Thursday that Indonesia faces a huge challenge to stop further outbreaks of bird flu, which has spread to 27 of 33 provinces in the archipelago nation.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has said that Indonesia needs to focus more on coordination between different levels of government in its battle against the virus.

Critics have charged that the government has been too reluctant to instigate the mass slaughters undertaken in other nations to stamp out the virus. It was also accused of initially covering up outbreaks.

Experts fear the virus may mutate into a form that can pass easily between humans, sparking a pandemic.