When physicians (or medical paraprofessionals) prescribe psychiatric drugs to children without the parent or legal guardian's fully informed consent, the prescribers could reasonably be charged with reckless endangerment and/or child endangerment because such drugs commonly cause a multitude of well-known adverse effects, including the following short list: worsening depression, worsening anxiety, sleep disturbances, suicidality, homicidality, mania, psychoses, heart problems, growth disturbances, malnutrition, cognitive disabilities, dementia, microbiome disorders, stroke, diabetes, serious withdrawal effects, death, sudden death, etc. We physicians (not only psychiatrists) normally only spend a small amount of our scarce time warning about a few of the dozens of potential adverse effects when we recommend drug treatment - and apparently most American courts uphold this questionable action when the rare malpractice case manages to be heard in the legal system.

And yet, Child Protective Services has the legal right to charge parents with medical neglect for refusing to give their child a known neurotoxic or psychotoxic drug that wasn't adequately tested either in the animal lab or in long-term clinical trials prior to being given marketing approval by the FDA.


This makes no sense to parents and can't be explained by their lawyers, especially if the parents know more than their medical caregivers about the multitude of potentially serious dangers that such drugs could pose for their child. It is worth noting that psychiatrists admit that there is no scientific test in existence that proves that children deserve a permanent mental illness label (and getting brain-altering drugs for the rest of their lives).

Indeed, making a psychiatric diagnosis in this big business era of high volume/high turnover patient care is based largely on an unscientific, sometimes absurd checklist of patient behaviors, emotions or thoughts, often hurriedly obtained after a relatively short office visit. Checklists of signs or symptoms of a newly thought-up "mental illness" periodically are composed at the annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association where the newly invented "disorder" is voted on (by a show of hands) by groups of volunteer psychiatrists, most of whom have financial and/or professional conflicts of interest. If a sufficient majority of convention attendees agree, the new diagnosis is then placed in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which contains hundreds of other unscientific check-lists of "mental disorders".

As we predicted, more states are following in the footsteps of California and restricting parents' freedom to protect their children's health. Check below to see if your state is one of them.

New York is considering a bill, S6017, that would eliminate all non-medical exemptions to vaccination. According to news coverage, Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, the bill's sponsor, said that parents worried for their children's safety "have bought into the garbage that these vaccinations can cause autism. That's a lot of crap."

In Humble Awe of Human Complexity

Eastern wisdom tells us that when we think we know, we don't. But when we admit ignorance, we achieve enlightenment. The most profound part of my departure from conventional medicine has been the depths of my surrender to all that we do not, cannot, and must not understand about the body and its experience. Humble awe and wonder are truly the only appropriate states for approaching the complexity of the human condition.

I have sought to validate my intuition around the hubris of our efforts to outsmart nature, through the available scientific literature. We are suffering from our dualistic perspectives: human vs germs, body vs. disease, I vs me.

Researchers from the universities of Granada (Spain) and Kvopio (Finland) have confirmed that cranberry extract helps fighting urinary tract infections (UTIs) in breastfed babies under one year of age. Their work has demonstrated that this compound prevents the prescription of antibiotics in the prophylaxis for recurrent urinary tract infections in infants with vesicoureteral reflux (VUR), so preventing the risk of increasing the bacterial antibiotic resistance.

This research, published in Anales de Pediatría (Annals of Pediatrics) magazine, has been funded by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III institute. It has counted with the collaboration of the university's Department of Analytical Chemistry and the Research and Development of Functional Food Centre (CIDAF, for its initials in Spanish), through professor Antonio Segura Carretero, and that of the University of Kvopio, Finland, through professor Tarja Nurmi.

The research involved the participation of 85 children under one year of age and 107 over that age, all of them affected by a recurrent urinary infection. 75 children were administered cranberry extract, while the other 117 were administered trimethoprim, a bacteriostatic antibiotic derived from trimethoxybenzyl pyrimidine, used almost exclusively to treat urinary infections.

Getting too little sleep during the week can increase some risk factors for diabetes, but sleeping late on weekends might help improve the picture, a small U.S. study suggests.

Researchers conducted a sleep experiment with 19 healthy young men and found just four nights of sleep deprivation were linked to changes in their blood suggesting their bodies weren't handling sugar as well as usual.

But then, when they let the men get extra sleep for the next two nights, their blood tests returned to normal, countering the effect of the short-term sleep deprivation.

"It gives us some hope that if there is no way to extend sleep during the week, people should try very hard to protect their sleep when they do get an opportunity to sleep in and sleep as much as possible to pay back the sleep debt," said lead study author Josaine Broussard of the University of Colorado Boulder.

The study doesn't prove sleeping late every weekend can counter the ill effects of insufficient rest every other night of the week, Broussard cautioned.

And it doesn't prove that catching up on sleep will prevent diabetes.

"We don't know if people can recover if the behavior is repeated every week," Broussard added by email. "It is likely though that if any group of people suffer from sleep loss, getting extra sleep will be beneficial."

The ticks that transmit Lyme disease, a debilitating flulike illness caused by Borrelia bacteria, are spreading rapidly across the United States. A new study shows just how rapidly. Over the past 20 years, the two species known to spread the disease to humans have together advanced into half of all the counties in the United States.

Lyme disease cases have tripled in the United States over the last 2 decades, making it the most commonly reported vector-borne disease in the Northern Hemisphere. The disease now affects around 300,000 Americans each year. If diagnosed early—a rash commonly appears around the site of the tick bite—Lyme can be effectively treated with antibiotics, but longer term infections can produce more serious symptoms, including joint stiffness, brain inflammation, and nerve pain.

To get a comprehensive map of where the two species—the blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis) and the western blacklegged tick (Ixodes pacificus)—were living, Rebecca Eisen and colleagues from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Fort Collins, Colorado, combined data from published papers with state and county tick surveillance data going back to 1996. They counted reports of tick sightings in each of the 3110 continental U.S. counties to determine whether those counties hosted an established population or just a few individuals. Ticks were considered "established" when sightings of at least six ticks, or two of the three life stages, had been reported in a year.

Not long ago, I watched a woman set a carton of Land O' Lakes Fat-Free Half-and-Half on the conveyor belt at a supermarket.

"Can I ask you why you're buying fat-free half-and-half?" I said. Half-and-half is defined by its fat content: about 10 percent, more than milk, less than cream.

"Because it's fat-free?" she responded.

"Do you know what they replace the fat with?" I asked.

"Hmm," she said, then lifted the carton and read the second ingredient on the label after skim milk: "Corn syrup." She frowned at me. Then she set the carton back on the conveyor belt to be scanned along with the rest of her groceries.

The woman apparently hadn't even thought to ask herself that question but had instead accepted the common belief that fat, an essential part of our diet, should be avoided whenever possible.

When you bake muffins in a non-stick tin, do you think about how the non-stick coating is going to affect your health? There has been enough publicity around damaged Teflon that some reading this will likely think about the harm that can come from chipped non-stick coating. After all, who wants to eat that stuff? But I still doubt that most people think about the health consequences of the vapors that are being emitted from the heated non-stick pan or the chemicals that are being leached into their muffins while they bake them.

Do you think about the vapors coming up from carpet-covered in-floor heating? Do you think about the health consequences of the particularly slippery dental floss that has become so popular? Do you think about how non-clump kitty litter may affect the health of your children? Do you think about how water-repellant packaging chemicals seep into the food they cover?

Most people don't think about those things. Consumer products with non-stick coatings are such a pervasive part of life that they're rarely thought about at all. Most people assume that those products are safe and that the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) and other regulatory agencies wouldn't let people use them if they were dangerous.

Unfortunately, there is increasing evidence that the chemicals used to make non-stick consumer products, chemicals such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, a.k.a. C8), are toxic and that they're related (causally, but that's difficult to prove) to many diseases. Even more worrisome is the fact that organofluorine compounds like PFOA bioaccumulate — meaning that they are not excreted from the body. Rather, they accumulate in the body with each exposure, and the risk of suffering from ill-health because of them increases as the toxic load on the body increases. Additionally, man-made organofluorine compounds accumulate in the environment and the food-chain. Creatures who are high on the food chain, like humans, get exposed to these chemical compounds that have concentrated our food. We're also affected by them when they're in the water that we drink and the air that we breathe.

Tim Peake is the first official British astronaut to walk in space. The former Army Air Corps officer has spent a month in space, after blasting off on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station on December 15 last year, but the spacewalk will doubtless be his most gruelling test.

But what exactly will he be going through, during his remarkable spell aboard the space station? Space travel leads to many changes in the human body, many of which have been investigated since Yuri Gargarin made the first manned spaceflight in 1961 - and an extensive team provides guidance and preparation for astronauts before, during and after any spaceflight. But if you're planning an out-of-this-world trip, here are some of the things to expect.

A day after news broke about a clinical research tragedy in France, more details are beginning to emerge about what happened at Biotrial, the private research company in Rennes where the phase I study took place. An information sheet for prospective trial participants, posted yesterday at the French regional news site Breizh-info.com, provides an overview of the study's goal and procedures, while also offering a glimpse of what it's like to partake in a lengthy drug safety study.

According to the document, which is in French, participants in this particular study group were to receive €1900, including travel expenses; in return, they agreed to stay at Biotrial's facility in Rennes for 2 weeks, swallow a drug on 10 consecutive days, undergo extensive medical tests, and provide at least 40 blood samples.