{"id":37029,"date":"2013-06-05T14:03:43","date_gmt":"2013-06-05T18:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=37029"},"modified":"2013-06-05T14:03:43","modified_gmt":"2013-06-05T18:03:43","slug":"anecdotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2013\/06\/05\/anecdotes\/","title":{"rendered":"anecdotes…"},"content":{"rendered":"
Healy was born in Raheny, Dublin. He completed an MD in neuroscience and studied psychiatry during a clinical research fellowship at Cambridge University<\/span> Clinical School. In 1990, Healy became a Senior Lecturer in Psychological Medicine at North Wales…<\/strong><\/sup><\/em><\/div>\n
David Healy – in Wikipedia<\/em><\/a>
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Pharmagossip<\/a> recently linked to a good article on Alternet that tell an abbreviated version of the story of Dr. David Healy<\/font><\/strong>‘s web-based database of adverse drug effects – Rxisk<\/a> – and why he created it:<\/div>\n
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Meet the Doctor Big Pharma Can’t Shut Up<\/a>
AlterNet<\/font><\/strong>
By Tamara Straus
May 30, 2013<\/div>\n
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For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.<\/p>\n

Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect — both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being “eclipsed” by drug companies. “It’s been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs,” said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.<\/p>\n

Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org<\/a> with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.<\/p>\n

Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of “biological psychiatry,” and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School\/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth<\/em>. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon<\/em> and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For years, it was fairly easy for people in the pharmaceutical and medical industries to label Healy, Kirsch and Breggin as alarmists. But two summers ago, one of the most prominent members of U.S. medical establishment, Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Journal of Medicine<\/em>, published an article damning the over-prescription of psychoactive drugs. In two essays in the June 23, 2011<\/a> and July 14, 2011<\/a> New York Review of Books<\/em>, Angell backed arguments by the university clinician Kirsh, the mental heath journalist Robert Whitaker, and Boston psychiatrist Daniel Carlat that there is something extremely suspicious about the following trends: the number of people treated for depression has tripled since the launch of Prozac® in 1987; 10 percent of Americans over age six are taking antidepressants; and 30 antipsychotics like Risperdal, Zyprexa and Seroquel are replacing cholesterol-lowering agents as the top-selling class of drugs in the U.S., largely because they are being prescribed to children.<\/p>\n

Angell’s articles should have been a bomb on the medical establishment. She wrote:<\/div>\n