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| Joan Luby, Big Pharma's Bottom Bitch |
Pfizer: Geodon
Janssen: Risperdal
And there are more.
Meet the person who has no issues with using kids as lab rats while getting paid for it: Joan Luby.
Taking such a financial hits leaves these corporations struggling to regain that profit margin...all paid through Medicaid.
Big Pharma Maneuvers to Label Toddlers as Depressed—and Drug Them
Once children are in the system, most become fodder for the Big Pharma machine for the rest of their miserable lives.
by Heidi Stevenson
20 October 2010
Big Pharma is bringing out the big guns to convince parents that their toddlers' normal behavior needs to be controlled with drugs.
Does your toddler cry? Is he bored? Why then, he must be depressed—and there's a drug for that.
Oh, she keeps yelling 'No!' and dawdles when you take her to the store? That's opposition defiant disorder. Don't worry, we can drug that out of her.
If the drug companies get their way, this is what will happen when you take your toddler to the routine well-child visit. What toddler isn't defiant? What toddler doesn't cry or get fussy? Those are normal behaviors, literally necessary if they're to grow into healthy functioning humans. What could be a better target for a drug company than every normal child?
And that's the goal. The first step was to find doctors who have no problem producing studies that claim such behaviors aren't normal. Dr. Joan Luby, of the Washington University School of Medicine, has been producing such studies for years. In the American Medical Association's Archives of General Psychiatry, she led the study entitled, "Preschool Depression"(1) She failed to mention her prior funding by Janssen, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and Shire. She has also been paid by at least one pharmaceutical firm as a speaker.
The National Institutes for Mental Health (NIMH) funded the study. A quick review of their website shows that they actively try to broaden the definition of mental illness and recommend drugs as the primary treatment in nearly all cases.
References cited in the study include work by some of the most egregious takers of Big Pharma's largesse, to the point that their work is known to be deeply flawed. This includes Joseph Biederman, the Harvard doctor who has been central to advocacy for drugging small children. He fraudulently signed papers for studies in which he had no involvement, and he actively helped support them in figuring out how to cover up when results were not as desired.(2)
The introduction starts with:
The validity of major depressive disorder (MDD) in childhood has been well established, with the disorder now widely recognized and treated in mental health settings.
Luby should know, since she's been responsible for much of the work that's gone into demonstrating the claim. This study simply extends the reach of such diagnoses to include children as young as two years. She has pushed for the use of antipsychotic, brain-destroying, drugs in small children by stating in a press release that children as young as three can suffer from bipolar disorder, but that there are:
...promising findings for the use of atypical antipsychotic agents and mood stabilizers, both singly and in combination.
Not even the FDA approves of antipsychotics for small children!
The study concludes:
Therefore, study findings that demonstrate longitudinal stability and homotypic continuity of preschool MDD [major depressive disorder] suggest that earlier interventions for MDD during the preschool period may be an important area for investigation in the search for more effective treatments for childhood MDD.
Can anyone doubt that the "earlier interventions" intended are largely drug-based?
Big Pharma's Problem—and Their Solution
Big Pharma has a problem. They haven't been able to come up with many blockbuster drugs in the last few years—a fact for which we should all be grateful. So, they're looking for new markets. What better way than to redefine normal, albeit frustrating and irritating, behavior in toddlers as mental illness?
What it comes down to is that Big Pharma is, first and foremost, a marketing machine. They see to it that the news media publishes what they want the public to see. They pay doctors and researchers to produce the results they want, and to widen the field of potential patients. Healthy people are redefined as suffering from diseases, often nonexistent ones.
However, what better way to assure their continued profits than by bringing the youngest children into their scam?
The doctors are every bit as guilty as Big Pharma. If they were to do their jobs properly, they'd stand between Big Pharma and patients, acting as gatekeepers, refusing to prescribe harmful drugs and warning people of the risks. Instead, they happily take Big Pharma money, and they funnel patients into the maw of the drug system.
Once in the system, most patients become fodder for the machine for the rest of their miserable lives. The drugs cause massive harm in adults, but in children the toll can be devastating. Antipsychotics and antidepressants destroy brain tissue.
How can it ever make sense to knowingly cause brain damage in a child? Apparently, it depends on one's point of view. If you're a cog in the medical system that wants more and more patients, then creating them is certainly beneficial. If you're part of Big Pharma, then anything that makes people sicker means more revenue for more and more of your chemicals.
Our children have become fodder for the modern medical system. We feed them in and that's where they remain. The more they're treated, the sicker they become. What a business plan!
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