If this story doesn't get a sizeable amount of the population to figuratively and literally get off their asses and start focusing on the big picture, we as a culture will be on pills to wake us up, make us eat, do our jobs, and then go to bed.

Oh, that's already in place!

You know what, sorry to say the following, but it has to be said and said this way:
IT'S NOT ABOUT A PILL, IT'S ABOUT A SKILL!!!

Most of illness is preventable, you just have to make tough choices and focus on what is right, not what is easy and convenient. This push to medicate our children is a scandal and I feel is also somewhat evil until proven appropriate and the next step as a realistic intervention.

And you wonder why people in other countries are more leery and reluctant to trust and work with us. They know better, why the hell can't we!?

Sorry, that's just my opinion.

Posted by: therapyfirst at July 7, 2008 11:08 AM

It makes me positively irate concerning the over-medicating of children, honest to God what has happened to us?!

An INDUSTRY HAS TAKEN OVER COMMON SENSE! Billions of dollars at the expense of innocent children; without long-term studies, who will EVER know the outcome until 20 years pass.

I've witnessed a decade of just how bad over-medicating a child can end up and it's not a good outcome!

Posted by: Stephany at July 7, 2008 12:16 PM

Just more capitalism gone awry -- and disease mongering -- in my view. We need to focus on the appalling diet most kids eat and lack of exercise, not more pill popping.

Posted by: Sara at July 7, 2008 04:12 PM

You'd have to be an idiot to put your kid on chelesterol drugs. I mean they can always start taking them when they're adults if they still have high cholesterol, but what is the point in giving them to kids?
Kids don't have heart attacks from high cholesterol, they don't have the same risks or problems as adults who have high cholesterol. You can always take the drug later in life if you still really need it. But there is no way you are going to convince me that kids need cholesterol meds. Even if these meds are "safe" for kids, think about what you're doing to the bodies natural processes for eliminating cholesterol and controlling it... you're not even giving the childs body a chance to adapt to the high cholesterol and get into the habbit of eliminating it from the body or bloodstream. So what happens to these kids when they become adults and decide they don't want to be on these meds and want to try more natural ways to keep they're cholesterol lower? Well they wont be able to because their bodies never learned how to do this efficiently/ their bodies never got a chance to make the adaptations needed to naturaly exert some control over cholesterol levels. These kids will be stuck on these meds forever because of that issue alone, but I guess that is the whole point anyways.

I am so sick of this push to put children on meds for diseases that can't even be proven to exist in children. High cholesterol isn't even a disease itself, it's a risk factor for actual diseases like atherosclerosis and heart disease (not caused by a defect) and the likelyhood that any child has these diseases or is at risk for them is so low that you can even count high cholesterol as a risk factor for these diseases in children. Yeah if their cholesterol is still high once they reach thier 30's then it could be a problem but there are sooooooooooooo many things that can change between the ages of 10 and 30 that would lower a persons cholesterol naturaly that it makes absolutely no sense to start treating people/kids at 6, 7 8, etc., or even 15 or 17 years old for heart disease and artherosclerosis that they *might* have when they are 30.

I can't believe that pediatricians are so stupid that they are actually giving kids statins. It's pure idiocy, they should know that high cholesterol isn't even a disease and doesn't warrent treatment unless the person is older or has already had a heart attack or has verified artherosclerosis... if doctors don't know this very basic medical fact then what the f*ck are they paid so much for? Seriously. Maybe though they aren't stupid, maybe they are just evil and are willing to put kids on drugs that do carry risks no matter how low, that the kids wouldn't be exposed to if not taking the med, a med they 100% do not need... and these doctors are willing to take those risks with these childrens lives and wellbeing because they are getting some sort of kickback from the drug companies. And if I am right about being on cholesterol drugs since childhood decreasing a persons ability to ever live without those drugs and have a normal cholesterol level any other way than staying on those drugs for life... well if I am right then those doctors are probably getting some pretty decent kickbacks considering they are bringing that company a life long consumer.

You know it's stuff like this, the greed and corruption of pharmacuetical corporations that are suppossed to be didicated to health, along with all the other un-checked greed and corruption in this world, that makes me pray for the end of civilization as we know it. Let Peak Oil come and go and be ignored and let the chaos, economic and societal breakdown destroy all of these industries. Let our own greed and stupidity, shortsightedness and self-centeredness...never thinking about the long term consequences of our actions and inactions drive us to our own destruction. We deserve it, we really do. We deserve all the consequences that have been lined up over the decades to collectively hit us over the head. I hope they all come at us at once and it destroys this fuct up consumerist, delusional completely manipulated and retarded culture we're all immersed in. Then at least humanity may stand the chance to learn a lession about being retarded, passive, easily manipulated and too intellectualy lazy to take the time to try and educate themselves about the very real and important issues in this world... instead choosing to spend all thier time on empty entertainment and expecting the government and someone else to take care of any and all of the problems we face as a species.
Yup, we need to learn some serious lessions, and we will I am certain of that. There are just too many problems we have been ignoring for too long thinking that nothing bad could ever happen to us... evetualy something seriously bad happens to every civilization, and then they collapse, and I don't see why our moder civilization would be any different. People think technology will save us but it wont, not unless we can creat a whole other planet earth, or two or three of them that we can use to get the resources our hugely over populated planet is running out of and where we can send people to live so that we don't just end up completely killing ourselves and most life on the planet because we are too stupid to stop reproducing at an idiotic rate and too stupid to even allow ourselves to think of the issues we face and the changes in our lifestyles that need to be made in order to avoid catastrophie... because we are spoiled stupid b*thces that think that someone else will always find a way to protect us and we just can't allow ourselves to be so "negative" and think about the bad things that could happen because it's just unrealistic to think that "they" (the government, the scientists, the industries etc.) would ever let anyting bad happen to us... as if people are actually smart enough not to f*ck themselves over, cause ya know that is totaly what history has show: that we never cause ourselves problems and civilizations never fail... and even if you do realize that history has shown these things happen, well we have all these medicines now, we can send a rover ship to mars and a man to the moon, we've got nuclear power, cars and planes and technology etc., so there is no way that anything as bad as the collapse of modern civilization as we know it could possibly happen... just no way because we are just soooo much smarter now and there is no way we wouldn't be prepared to or able to deal with any major problems after the fact cause technology will save us all.... whatever yeah right!

Screw it, yeah more people will die of infections and such but that's the way mother nature intended it and I'd rather be living in a world where I am more likely to die of natural causes and natural illnesses than I am to die from the inappropraite medicines that doctors prescribe. ... and believe me if things keep on going the way they are going now, with drug companies becoming more and more reckless and willing to kill and harm more and more people because they are willing to accept less and less of a profit difference between if they pull the drug off the market or label it with proper warnings versus if they cover-up the danger of thier drugs and just pay the victims by settling class action lawsuits... well if things keep going like they have, with that trend in profit calculations and the trend in the media where these problems are mostly ignored and put aside to make more room for idiots to obsess about celebrities lives.... and drug companies being allowed to continue with this DTC advertising, editing of wikipedia articles to make thier drugs look safer, sponsoring of health websites, paying people to goonline and spin thier drugs, spending more money on marketting than they do on trying to come up with safer more effective drugs (this should be illegal), paying off doctors and researchers (docs and researchers should not be allowed to have one penny of drug company money, all trails should be government sponsored and it should be illegal to even take a free pen from a pharma rep).... well iotragenic death will become the leading cause of death in the USA and no one will give a shit or even be aware of it because everyone in the media, the health industry and everywhere will be being paid off to just print more articles about how great X, Y or Z drug is and how it's so unfair and wrong for people to blame the drug compamny and the drugs for anything they do to harm people and to spin how much all these drugs are helping everyone and make excuses as to why the statistics are wrong or that they actually prove the opposite of what some medical article said... like if the drug is shown to cause harm, the media will continue to print spin articles that are based on bullshit saying that that is not true.... and since all the doctors are being paid off they wont take the time to double check and see if the spin is BS and they'll just accept it and over time it will become standard practice to kill 10 or 20% of your patients and then people wont even be able to sue thier doctors because everyone is doing it.

I'd rather see people starving to death than dieing because the above is allowed to happen. At least then if I die from some infection or from starvation, at least I'll know that there is a chance that humanity has learned some sort of lession and eventually will stabalize and come back into harmony with the earth...at least a little better than we are now. If I die 20 years from now because I was prescribed a medication I didn't actually need in the first place, and I have had to spend the last 20 years watching this disgusting culture we live in in this country and point in history continueing on unchecked and having technology actually save us from having to feel the consequences for our actions... well I'll die a much sadder person in the later scenerio because I will know that we as a species will continue on with this destructive, wasteful, consumerist, superficial materialst... money, entertainment and celebrity OBSESSED way of life and that we will in the end end up overpopulating the planet to such an extreem and using up our resources for such stupid shit, that most of us will die along with most of the life on the planet as we reach the tipping poitn where we have dumped so many toxic chemicals and pharmacueticals into the water table that even our pharmacueticaly altered and dependant bodies can't stand it, and ecosystemds begin to collapse at an alarming rate, and we realize we don't have enough water to support the life of an every expanding population and so we have to resort to genocide in order to desperately try to keep some of ourselves alive even while the ecosystems we depend on have reached the point where they can not recover, no matter what technological solutions we try to apply... and the earth will become a barren place with only the heartiest of life forms living thru this ecological collapse... and life wil have to begin a new and a whole new evolution of life will have to take place over hundreds of millions of years in order for there again to be an earth covered in millions of different and beautiful forms of life.

yeah I know I went on a tangent. Blame it on my psyche meds that are making me feel totaly loaded right now. it's a legal high and that's all rx psych meds have ever been for me, either they make me feel high or they make me feel low (like alcohol and pot).

Posted by: katielou82 at July 7, 2008 04:33 PM

Well let me tell you a little something about statins. I am sure some of you have been as perplexed as myself by the all the cholesterol propaganda out there.

My GP and I love her to death, but she does not do her homework on meds. We argue about this once every few months.

I have high cholesterol and I had had high cholesterol my entire life and so has half the people in my family.

My doctor panics at my cholesterol level. She keeps telling me I am going to have a heart attack even though I don't eat garage food and I do tai chi every day and my weight is average.

People in my family die of old age in their 80s and 90s or emphysema due to smoking into their 70s

She also forgets that over half of all people in the US who actually have heart attacks do not have high cholesterol when it happens.

She begs me to try Lipitor and I always so no and go have a class of red wine instead

I met someone who got suckered into the cholesterol scam and went on Lipitor. He came to me for some physical therapy and Tai chi training.

He was becoming a twitching ball of jelly from Lipitor. He had dry mouth and chapped lips as bad or worse than lithium carbonate effects

He was constantly shaking worse than any palsy I had seen almost like Alzheimer's But he was not in much pain because of the constant industrial strength pain killers he was on.

He suffered from myelin degeneration. The fatty sheath around his nerves was dissolving.

I could not help him. I saw him a few times. He just got worse and worse even after stopping Lipitor. It was horrible.

So..no no no no no these drugs are not for children, they are not even for adults.

Folks are you are putting this together? These are medically induced solutions for medically created problems

I never bought the chemical imbalance theory when I was a kid nor do I buy that kids will be helped long run by being poisoned with psych meds.

I don't think kids need statins when if they have high cholesterol their entire lives it does not mean they will have a heart attack.

I would not have so much of a problem if Big Pharma aimed this stuff only at adults.

But they position themselves and manipulate and connive and deceive and put kids needlessly at risk entirely for profit.

They position themselves to be encountered by vulnerable populations like teens and new moms, groups we expect to have mood swings they swoop in and spam pills for everything.

They don't care about creating an artificial health scam like cholesterol or mental health epidemic like childhood bipolar and they have no qualms whatsoever at aiming for the helpless and those with limited civil rights to fight back.

That makes Big Pharma a real evil in our lives.

It's not just a mindless machine, real people make decisions at the top at those places.

It is being run not by a soulless Artificial Intelligence, but by soulless human beings who will sell out the future of our kids minds and bodies in order to be at the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs during their lives.

Disgusting

Paraphrasing something George Carlin said,

Americans have cell phones that can make pancakes and so as long you don't take the toys away, we will sit here complacently and let them do it us.

Posted by: Jane at July 7, 2008 05:03 PM

Yes, Sara and it's just one industry after another: junk food, fast food, school lunches(full of fat & poor nutrition paid by the Government!)and then there is the tech side of the lack of exercise, and just plain being kids outside--we've explosed into a new world none of us ever had to deal with as kids.(speaking from a 48 year old point of view here). I work in the school system, and have also worked in the cafeteria, and those lunches are fat-filled cheap garbage with a 8 oz carton of milk. Some schools attempt to improve, mostly private ones can.

I find it very sad, that some kids may not know what I did: running through sprinklers in the summer, riding bikes, catching frogs in ponds...and as a result my kids all did the same thing--right down to "come in when the street light comes on".

I hope parents now have some of that to tap into, and can push off this drugged-up crap for an excuse for a society.

sorry for the 50 cent rant.

Posted by: Stephany at July 7, 2008 05:13 PM

Of course, no one is looking into the fact that those anti psychotics kids are on could be causing the increase in cholesterol. Instead, it is drug the side effects and the poor kids will be in a pharma hell they can't get out of. Unbelieavable.

AA

Posted by: AA at July 7, 2008 05:39 PM

Check out a nutritional remedy that loweres cholesterol - Niacin.
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v01n10.shtml

Posted by: Lilly NC at July 10, 2008 10:48 AM

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