|
[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD: Vera, you have hit the nail on the head, it was a healing profession when I came into it in 1960, feeling privileged and proud. They created a physician glut and this was the vehicle to the takeover, and perversion. I have a strong suspicion that LBJ doubled the capacity of US med schools with a series of laws in the late 60s at the behest of the pharma industry, in collusion with medical academia as a means of breaking the grip of moral physicians, prepared only to do what was right, having no need to invent things to do...not, that is, until the glut which was becoming a fact as of '75-'80. Today the physician/populace ratio is 300 physicians/100,000 populatiion, more than twice the 145/100,000 in 1965, meaning that physicians today have half the new patients (and see 1/2 the real disease) they did in 1965. I can tell you what it was like having no need to invent treatments and diagnoses to stay solvent. best, Fred.] Vera wrote: ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP) www.researchprotection.org Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav 212-595-8974 e-mail: veracare@rcn.com FYI The following "must read" articles about the perversion of medicine, once the healing profession, into an instrument of assault. Human rights and individual dignity are being threatened by those who profit from the medicalization of the human condition. A News report about an invasive drug releasing implant device for psychiatric patients has sparked fear and rage among recovered former psychiatric patients who are productive members of the community without drugs. The implant was developed by the University of Pennsylvania: Implant May Stabilize Schizophrenia Patients For Year By Ellen O'Brien 30-May-2002 There is a growing sense that psychiatry and its unholy alliance with the pharmaceutical industry (to borrow a phrase from Dr. Loren Mosher, a psychiatrist who serves on AHRP's board of directors) poses a threat to the public. It is a profession whose aggressive prescribing practices are out of control: healthy children are being exposed to chemical restraints by a profession in need of legal restraints: See: Industry Role in Medical Meeting Decried by Shankar Vedantam. THE WASHINGTON POST.May 25, 2002. See also: Redflags Weekly and its documents about the David Healy Affair. (Dr. Healy is a British psychiatrist who ran afoul of those who profit from the antidepressant drug market by suppressing public disclosure of the risks associated with those drugs--for some patients the risk is drug-induced suicide. Psychotropic drugs are being pushed by physicians--some would say as ruthlessly as they are pushed by drug dealers on the street. The remuneration for prescription drug pushers, however, is far greater than for their criminal colleagues. What, one wonders, would lead physicians to abandon their professional responsibility to "do no harm" by inventing conditions in order to increase drug sales? "Money and Madness" By Kelly Patricia O'Meara. Insight Magazine Cover Story Posted June 3, 2002 "Move Over Mengele, It's Fuller Time Now" An Essay by Vicki Fox Smith of MADNATION. Drug-Related Death of Fifteen Year Old Daughter Vanessa By Terence H. Young.
|