Free The UltraMind Solution by Mark Hyman Page B

your bedroom at night are examples of psychosis.
     
    But now, with little hesitation or scientific evidence, antipsychotics are given to children with behavioral problems, autism, and ADHD, and to adults with depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disease, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.

    These drugs can lead to serious side effects. Besides acting like a chemical straitjacket and making people dull, slow, and stupid, they increase the risk of obesity, diabetes, stroke, blood clots, and more serious conditions known as neuroleptic malignant syndrome (where your body literally burns up with fever and your muscles are destroyed) and tardive dyskinesia (uncontrolled repetitive, involuntary, and purposeless movements such as lip smacking, rapid eye blinking, grimacing, and spasms in the legs).
     
    Have we suddenly all gone crazy?

    What most consumers don’t understand is that drug testing is often very limited before drug approval. New drugs are tested on a few hundred to a few thousand people often for a very limited time (usually a few weeks to a few months). Then they are released on the market, supported by more than $30 billion in pharmaceutical advertising dollars (or about $25,000 a year for each one of the 737,000 physicians in America).
     
    Once approved, these drugs can be prescribed for
any
use.

    We in the medical industry call these “off-label uses.”

    For example, the drug may be approved
only
for use in schizophrenia (as in the examples of antipsychotics above). But doctors can prescribe it for anyone they like—from someone who is overly anxious to someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder to a child whose behavior is out of control.

    Once the drug is approved, there is no official tracking of its risks or benefits to the millions who are prescribed the drug. It’s left up to patients or doctors to self-report problems.
     
    This leaves the public very vulnerable. Doctors are using the only tools they know how to use, but that’s the way they get into trouble.

    Unfortunately, it appears that drug companies often see any backlash or lawsuits as simply part of their “research and development” expenses of their drugs.
     
    Bloomberg News reported in December 2006:

Nationwide, several lawsuits accuse drug companies of engaging in deceptive marketing by overstating the effectiveness and understating the risks of newer antipsychotics. The suits also claim companies promoted the drugs for unapproved uses
.
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska and West Virginia sued Eli Lilly & Co. this year on behalf of their Medicaid health programs for the poor. They said the company fraudulently touted the antipsychotic Zyprexa for unapproved uses. Indianapolis-based Lilly settled about eight thousand personal-injury complaints for $700 million in 2005 and faces four thousand more claims.

    We are a drug-addicted society, and we are overprescribed medication when there are better solutions. According to
The Journal of the American Medical Association,
in an average week 81 percent of Americans use at least one medication, 50 percent take at least one prescription drug, and 7 percent take five or more drugs. Of those over sixty-five years old, 12 percent take at least ten medications and 23 percent take at least five medications. 13

    This bias toward medication sadly distracts us from finding the real or best answers to our ailments.

    Unfortunately, the billions of dollars that pour into the pharmaceutical industry every year are not spent researching or promoting changes in diet, nutrient therapies, detoxification, addressing food allergies, and other potentially beneficial treatments. Instead, our economy thrives on products and services that make us sick or benefit from our illness (drugs, processed foods, fast foods, and companies that thrive by adding to our environmental toxic load).
     
    Who knows where we would be if such research were being done.

    The next frontier in medicine,