Denying Care to Brain Injured Vets

It's easy to put a Support Our Troops bumper sticker on the back of your car. It feels good and costs nothing. Here's what costs: paying for the long term treatment and care for service members suffering from traumatic brain injury. That requires - brace yourselves - taxes. In the frenzy undertaken by House Republicans to make the world safe for corporate socialism, lots of people suffer. The poor. The middle class. And the men and women we send into harm's way. Tricare, the mangled care - oops, managed care - organization that insures military personnel, veterans, and their families is refusing to provide the kind of care that has been repeatedly shown to bring about the best recovery for brain injured vets, cognitive rehabilitation therapy. Why? Well, it's expensive so they contracted with a private consultant to say more study is needed despite the overwhelming evidence for its efficacy. Want to do something to really support our troops? Write or call your Congressional Representative and US Senators and urge them to demand that Tricare provide the treatment our service members need and deserve! Please pass this on.

Denying The Best Care to Our Troops

Antidepressants Not Effective for Minor Depression

Most people who are depressed experience minor depression (though it never feels "minor" to the individual.) Minor depression is a dysphoric mood that leaves the person unhappy most of the time but does not significantly impair day to day functioning. The vast majority of prescriptions for antidepressants are written for minor depression, costing the health care system and, ultimately, all of us billions of dollars. As this review indicates, antidepressants are no better than placebo for minor depression. i.e., they don't help. They do enrich the pharmaceutical companies so don't expect the science to change the practice.

Antidepressants Not Effective with Minor Depression

Drug Cocktails - Easy, Cheap, and Fatal

The incidence of PTSD and other mental health disorders in the armed forces is extremely high for a number of reasons: a ten year war, multiple tours, and repeated exposure to intense violence and fear are some. Two additional reasons: a shortage of mental health professionals and the over-reliance on prescription medications. Sometimes troops are given drug cocktails and sometimes these prove fatal. More soldiers are now dying from suicide than from combat. As Congress looks to the most vulnerable to cut the budget to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations, please put some pressure on them to at least give our troops what we promised - first rate care during and after their service.

Drug Cocktails

Antipsychotics' Effect on the Brain

I've written previously about the potential negative impact of long term use of psychotropic medication on the brain. This new article in the Archives of General Psychiatry provides further evidence. Antipsychotics used to treat schizophrenia appear to cause a loss of brain tissue over time. Subtle but important cognitive impairments have long been noted in schizophrenics but were thought to be a result of the disorder itself. Now it is becoming increasingly clear that these effects are due to the drugs used to treat schizophrenia. Robert Whitaker has written extensively about this phenomenon in Anatomy of An Epidemic. Antipsychotics are not the only psychiatric drug that cause significant problems for people. However, the antipsychotics are of particular concern for two reasons. The first is the change in the brain itself, as described in the article linked below. The second reason is the widespread prescription of anti-psychotics for non-psychotic reasons. Antipsychotics are heavily marketed for other symptoms including depression and mood lability. And, as I've written previously, they are increasingly used with children. Psychiatry and BigPharma have invested very heavily in the notion of every human problem as a "brain disease" due to "chemical imbalances" that can only be remedied with drugs prescribed, of course, by psychiatrists. We are beginning to see the results of this overly simplistic, reductionistic model of human behavior.

Antipsychotics for schizophrenia associated with subtle loss in brain volume

Of the Corporation, by the Corporation, and for the Corporation!

When will people wake up to the fact that we have become a country of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation? That both parties are complicit in policies explicitly designed to facilitate the massive accumulation of wealth by the very few and a rapid race to the bottom by the rest of us? That attacks on government and public employees for so-called sweet benefits and pensions are nothing but a cover for the corporate plundering of benefits and pensions in the private sector while profits and bonuses for executives go through the roof?

Business Doesn't Need American Workers

Little Pharma: Read It and Weep

Maggie Kozel, M.D. reveals a very frightening statistic: One in four American kids take chronic prescription meds. That's right, 25% of our children are taking daily medication for chronic conditions. Over 40 million kids are taking stimulants, anti-depressants, and anti-psychotics. The science behind this prescription epidemic? To put it kindly, it's poor. Poor diagnostic criteria, poor clinical studies establishing efficacy and safety, and extremely poor long term understanding of what happens in a child's brain when you disturb it with pharmaceuticals designed for adults and, e.g., fundamentally alter the serotonin system. Our health care system is way off track. It's bad enough when it hurts adults. What the pharmaceutical industry is doing to our children is criminal.

Little Pharma: One in Four Kids Medicated

Brain Changer

Marketing has convinced people that mood disturbances like depression and anxiety are due to "chemical imbalance" in the brain. There's little evidence for this causal explanation. Our brain chemistry may change as a result of many things, including depression, anxiety, stress, joy, positive or negative thinking, and as indicated in this article, meditation.  Meditation has been very helpful in improving mood disorders, stress, attention, insomnia, and a host of other conditions. More importantly, it seems to enhance one's ability to be a fully present and active participant in one's own life. 

How Meditation May Change the Brain