The state of Oregon has filed a lawsuit against drug maker Johnson & Johnson, claiming the company secretly removed defective Motrin from store shelves, which authorities say may have put the public at risk.
Foster children are unfortunates without parents and families, not a medical population—not victims of a disease or epidemic. I would add here that increasingly, foster children are children “kidnapped” by government—by child protective services and family courts, their parents having had the audacity to resist the psychiatric labeling and drugging and having been charged with “medical neglect” for their audacity.
Antipsychotics are the top-selling class of drugs in the United States, with sales of $14.6 billion in 2009 alone. Their use in children and adolescents in the United States is increasingly prevalent — and children in foster care are among the most likely to be medicated.
On this week’s episode of Need to Know, we go inside the foster care system for an installment of The Watch List: We investigate the use and potential overuse of powerful antipsychotic medication on foster children, with a special look at Texas, which has worked to reform its practices. (for future archive)
Despite their widespread advertising, prescriptions and use, atypical antipsychotic medications — the newest kind of antipsychotic medication available — lacks sufficient evidence to support their widespread and generalized usage. This according to a new study out of the Stanford University School of Medicine and University of Chicago.
A report in today’s newspaper says that children with attention deficit disorder (ADHD) can’t switch off the default mode network (DMN) in their brains, the daydreaming function. Stimulant drugs such as methylphenidate may help to switch off this DMN, turn down the volume, as it were, and enable the ADHD sufferer to focus on a task.
Although many experts have warned about the dangers of children using stimulant drugs like Ritalin frequently, doctors continue prescribing these drugs at an alarming rate.
According to Medco Health Solutions Inc., roughly one in four children and nearly 30% of those ages 10 to 19 years take prescription medication on a routine basis.
There is only one mental health disorder: Psychiatristentia Delusiono Grandeur Disorder (PDGD) Suffers believe themselves to be the sole arbiters of mental health and they compulsively invent new names for mental health disorders and then accuse people of suffering from them. These are seriously disturbed and dangerous individuals best not approached alone. Symptoms include breaking into a sweat and being struck dumb when encountering someone who understands logical fallacies.
Gage Martindale, who is 8 years old, has been taking a blood-pressure drug since he was a toddler. “I want to be healthy, and I don’t want things in my heart to go wrong,” he says.
According to a recent study from Medico Health Solutions Inc., a leading American pharmacy-benefit manager, more than a quarter of U.S. children and teenagers are taking prescription medication on a regular basis. Close to 7 percent are on more than one medication.
With little oversight and apparent carte blanche, a relative handful of Texas physicians wrote $47 million worth of Medicaid prescriptions for powerful antipsychotic and anti-anxiety drugs over the past two years, according to a Star-Telegram analysis.
Washington, DC, 7 December 2010 ? The enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 expands Medicare benefits to scores of previously uninsured individuals including many of our nation's children. While access to treatment is laudable, the quality of such treatment is the subject of an article in the December issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
The Food and Drug Administration will hold a meeting to determine if there is a negative link between child consumption of synthetic color additives in food and a child’s behavior.
Doctors are urging caution with over-the-counter children's medicine as new research released today shows that many products are confusing and could lead to deadly overdoses.
The study found that of 148 products that came with measuring devices, almost all of them - 146 - had inconsistencies between the directions in or on the package and the markings on the device. The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at the 200 top-selling pediatric liquid medications in late 2008 and through October of 2009.
Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) Birmingham today released the figures in the Freedom of Information Act highlighting the psychiatric infiltration of the education system and subsequent damage to young girls? S minds in the West Midlands and Birmingham.
I cam across this article recently from the New York Times. It discusses the case of a young boy who was started on an antipsychotic medication when he was 18 months old, and by the time he was three, he was on an antidepressant, antipsychotic, sleeping tablets, and something for ADD (presumably a stimulant).
Johnson & Johnson continues to have troubles with its pharmaceutical plant in Puerto Rico, where subsidiary McNeil Consumer Healthcare had to recall millions of bottles of Tylenol, Motrin and other products in January. The latest bad news for Johnson & Johnson came from the Food and Drug Administration after inspectors found numerous problems with the Puerto Rican operation.
The chance that a teenager or young adult will receive a prescription for a controlled medication has nearly doubled in the last 15 years in the U.S., according to a new report.
It was disturbing to read about the dramatic increase in diagnosed cases of ADHD in N.C. between 2003 and 2007 (“Cases of ADHD rocket in state,” AC-T, Nov. 20). This huge increase in such a short time frame seems inexplicable. In the mid-1990s, there was an explosion in the number of people diagnosed with ADHD once adults were included and the inattentive type of ADHD recognized. Expansion in diagnostic criteria and several popular books like “Driven to Distraction” and “Out of the Fog” increased public awareness of this disorder.
CHICAGO — Removing cough and cold medicines for very young children from store shelves led to a big decline in emergency room visits for bad reactions to the drugs, government research found.
At the request of Congress, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) is seeking information regarding cases in which state foster children have been prescribed psychotropic medication outside of federal regulations or accepted medical standards of practice.
National School Psychology Awareness Week takes place each year during the second week of November. This is a time set aside for efforts to promote awareness and understanding of the field of school psychology. So, who are school psychologists and what exactly do they do? To begin with, they are trained at the graduate level in the areas of both education and psychology. They use this training to help children in the areas of academics, social and behavioral relations. School psychologists do receive highly specialized training for working in educational settings, but in most cases they are not doctors and they are not licensed for private practice as a psychologist. School psychologists are trained to advocate for the best interests of children while also collaborating with parents, teachers and administrators. In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on providing positive learning environments for children in school.
Ideas about children and their development have varied across different times and cultural contexts. However, within the discipline of child development within psychology four common views about how children develop have been identified.
They're Nevada's foster children--and as Contact 13 Chief Investigator Darcy Spears uncovered, they're being given potentially dangerous and powerful drugs that they may not need... with taxpayers footing the bill.
Tommy made good grades in the first grade, and his teacher said he was a big help and a delight to have in the classroom. Soon after this report card was sent home, Tommy’s toddler sister drowned in the bathtub while Tommy was watching her and his other siblings. Tommy’s parents were arrested, the surviving children entered foster care and Tommy’s early successes and hopes for the future began to fade.
SPECIAL REPORT: To many parents, diagnosing a child with depression as young as 2-years-old sound unconscionable. Many ask, what child doesn’t cry or become irritable? What toddler doesn’t become bored or unhappy at times?
Neuroscientists at the Georgetown University Medical Center have pointed out that a brain scan with functional MRI (fMRI) was enough to predict which patients with paediatric anxiety disorder will respond to 'talk therapy', and so may not need to use psychiatric medication.
In the past, society believed that the world was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth. Today we believe that the government knows what's best for us and that the drug Ritalin (Methylphenidate) is a cure for the brain disorders Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
In a rare move, the Justice Department on Tuesday announced that it had charged a former vice president and top lawyer for the British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline with making false statements and obstructing a federal investigation into illegal marketing of the antidepressant Wellbutrin for weight loss.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a neurobehavioral disorder that typically begins in childhood and often persists into adulthood. ADHD is characterized by developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention and hyperactivity resulting in functional impairment in academic, family, and social settings (1). ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed neurobehavioral disorder of childhood, with previous reports documenting increasing trends in prevalence during the past decade and increases in ADHD medication use (2,3). National estimates of the number of children reported by their parents to have ever been diagnosed with ADHD and the percentage of children with ADHD currently taking ADHD medications were published in 2005 using data from the 2003 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) (4,5). This report describes results from the second administration of NSCH in 2007 (6), which indicated that the percentage of children aged 4--17 years with a parent-reported ADHD diagnosis (ever) increased from 7.8% to 9.5% during 2003--2007, representing a 21.8% increase in 4 years. The findings in this report help to further characterize the substantial impact of ADHD on families.
According to a new survey by Consumer Reports, 84 percent of children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are treated with drugs at some point.
Dr. Peter Breggin (breggin.com) has been the medical expert in countless court cases involving the use or misuse of psychoactive medications. This unusual position has given him unprecedented access to private pharmaceutical research and correspondence files, information from which informs this straight-talking guide to the most prescribed and controversial category of drugs: antidepressants.
Defective drug legislation is big right now. Pharma is rapidly becoming the next big tobacco but on a much grander scale.
Class action lawsuits with 10,000s of victims are lashing out against drug firms while even State governments level more lawsuits against them.
Law firms are suing pharmaceutical companies for unethical marketing practices, a failure to warn the public about potentially harmful and sometimes deadly side effects when they were known about prior to marketing, downplaying side effects while hyping up benefits, etc.
If you have been damaged by a medication you can potentially sue and in most cases lawyers will take your case for free.
Some drugs that are listed on law office websites as defective drugs include; Vioxx, Bextra, Celebrex, Crestor, Baycol, Viagra, Cialis, Risperdal, Seroguel, Zyprexa, Adderall, Ritalin, Neurotin, Paxil, Prozac, Ambien, Zoloft.
Some defective drugs have been associated with death, suicide, homicide, neurological damage, heart attacks, diabetes, excessive weight gain, sexual dysfunction, impertinency, vision loss and a host of other side effects.
Virtually every psychotropic (psychiatric) drug is listed on some defective drug website including antidepressants, antipsychotic, anti-anxiety medications (anxiolytics), etc.
Drug companies that are being sued include Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Janssen, Abbott, Novartis, Wyeth, etc.
You can get a free legal consultations just by doing a search with the drug name and the world lawyer.
Medications given to children for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do not appear to pose risks to their cardiovascular health over the long term, at least at low doses, according to a new study conducted in Sweden.
(NaturalNews) The European Commission has approved a chewable version of Pfizer's blockbuster cholesterol drug Lipitor, for use in children over the age of 10.
In the 1990s, the pharmaceutical industry repeatedly was named the most profitable industry in the world. More than a decade later, the industry tops a more dubious list: the No. 1 source of fraud-related settlements with the Department of Justice, an advocacy group says.
Drug companies say the millions of dollars they pay physicians for speaking and consulting justly compensates them for the laudable work of educating their colleagues.
Drug companies have long kept secret details of the payments they make to doctors for promoting their drugs. But seven companies have begun posting names and compensation on the Web, some as the result of legal settlements. ProPublica compiled these disclosures, totaling $258 million, into a single database that allows patients to search for their doctor. Receiving payments isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does raise ethical issues.
More than half of U.S. medical schools don't provide any instruction on federal fraud and abuse laws, according to a report from the Office of Inspector General.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD or ADHD) is a neuron behavioral developmental disorder. It is the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorder in children affecting about 3 to 5% of children globally with symptoms starting before seven years of age. It is characterized by a persistent pattern of impulsiveness and inattention, with or without a component of hyperactivity. ADHD is diagnosed twice as frequently in boys as in girls, though studies suggest this discrepancy may be due to subjective bias. ADHD is generally a chronic disorder with 30 to 50% of those individuals diagnosed in childhood continuing to have symptoms into adulthood. As they mature, adolescents and adults with ADHD are likely to develop coping mechanisms to compensate for their impairment.
Drug giant Pfizer has canceled a scheduled clinical trial of its antipsychotic drug Geodon after the FDA accused it of subjecting child participants in a prior study to "widespread overdosing."
A Bangor psychiatric practice that serves thousands of area residents will stop seeing MaineCare patients next month, citing an untenable reduction in payments from the MaineCare program.
Washington state is working to reverse a disturbing trend: the disproportionate use of adult antipsychotic drugs to treat poor kids with mental illness.
It may be hard for people to imagine that drug reps can get us to prescribe a particular drug by simply giving us a meal or being nice to us. The process is subtle, but it happens all the time. To quote Ahari again: “Drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.”
The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case Tuesday that could pave the way for numerous lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, a particularly high-stakes issue in light of the thousands of claims, so far unproven scientifically, linking vaccines to autism.
For the next seven years, Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics will play a key role in a $95 million federal contract to improve drug label dosing instructions for children.
What do you imagine the halls of a juvenile detention facility sound like? Loud and rowdy? These youth weren’t incarcerated for being docile and submissive, after all, so it would seem highly unlikely one could find a quiet spot in such an institution, right? But, according to some, the sounds of juvenile detention centers have changed drastically over the past several decades -- they've gotten a lot quieter -- largely due to the use of prescription sedation.
Due to a paucity of data, controversy persists regarding the risk of cardiac events associated with children taking medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to a speaker here at the 2010 American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition.
The FDA has approved clonidine hydrochloride (Kapvay) as the first attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drug concomitantly used with a stimulant.
Every few months some miracle drug or other is rolled out with bells and confetti, but only once or twice in a generation does the real thing come along.
The American Psychiatric Association has a hot potato on its hands as it updates its catalog of mental disorders — whether to include parental alienation, a disputed term conveying how a child's relationship with one estranged parent can be poisoned by the other.
The figures are out and they are startling to say the least ! It is now reckoned that about 10% of American children are kids with ADHD and that could be as many as 2.4 million children. Even more alarming is the fact that only about 50% of these have actually got diagnosed and are getting treatment. ADHD in small kids may seem a relatively minor problem but with figures like these, it does mean that there is an enormous pool of people who are going to carry ADHD into adulthood.
In a recent TED conference presentation, Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to new vaccine efforts, speaks on the issue of CO2 emissions and its effects on climate change. He presents a formula for tracking CO2 emissions as follows: CO2 = P x S x E x C.
Should psychiatric medication be prescribed for a child? Only a parent, in consultation with a doctor, can make that choice. Parents should be fully aware of the conditions that call for such medication and the appropriate drug used for treatment. Though a medication treatment plan for a child may not completely remove all symptoms of a disorder, at the very least, the child will experience a definite improvement in his or her day-to-day life. Long-term problems are minimal when compared to the continuation of a mental disorder.
(NaturalNews) The use of long-term prescription drugs by children has increased four times faster among children in the past decade than among the general population, according to a report by Medco Health Solutions.
The narrative of personal improvement is as American as baseball—almost as American as a fondness for illegal and prescription drugs. From steroids and human growth hormones on the baseball diamond to amphetamines in college libraries and quadrangles, performance enhancing drugs combine a desire for productivity and success with drug abuse in a way that is uniquely American. And the statistics confirm their growing demand: the journal Addiction reports that on certain college campuses, especially competitive Northeastern colleges, up to 25 percent of students admitted to having misused ADHD medication in the past year. Yet despite their prevalence, these drugs, and the disorder they treat, are highly misunderstood.
There is something strangely disquieting about standing in a padded cell – focusing on the tiny chink of light coming through the slatted window in the equally padded door; imagining the distress and confusion that must have once surged through the patients at the Glenside psychiatric hospital when they found themselves locked in one of these padded rooms.
A local mother says she came dangerously close to giving her child the wrong prescription. As Susan Wornick reports, it's one of about 2 dozen mistakes by CVS pharmacy over the last year.
Over the past decade, psychotropic medication use in the general youth population has more than doubled. Estimated rates of psychotropic medication use in foster care youth, however, are much higher (ranging from 13-52%) than those in the general youth population (4%).
The Tufts Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) today issued a landmark report from a multi-state study on psychotropic medication oversight in foster care. Led by Laurel K. Leslie, MD, MPH at Tufts CTSI, Christopher Bellonci, MD at Tufts Medical Center and Justeen Hyde, PhD at Cambridge Health Alliance, the study examined state policies and practices in 47 states, including Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia regarding the use of medication for treating behavioral and mental health problems in foster care children and adolescents ages 2 to 21 years.
Johnson & Johnson has taken a huge hit this year with its massive recall of over-the-counter children's cough medicine and Tylenol products. But new information gathered through a Congressional investigation has revealed that the company knew about problems with its Motrin pain reliever product as well, and planned to secretly hire subcontractors to buy up the product from store shelves without notifying consumers about potential dangers.
Sandy Waide's grandson was having a difficult time in preschool. He ignored his teacher's instructions and refused to sit still. One morning he took a fish out of the classroom aquarium. That ended up being his last day there.
Forest Labs (FRX) appears to have initially underestimated how much it needed to pay the feds to go away: In 2009, the company said it had set aside $170 million in case it needed to settle a Department of Justice investigation of the kickbacks it paid in its marketing of Celexa and Lexapro, two antidepressants. Today, the company paid $313 million to wrap up the probes.
Drug maker Forest Laboratories of Earth City is paying 313-million dollars to settle criminal and civil complains filed against it by the federal government.
Shire plc (LSE: SHP, Nasdaq: SHPGY), the global specialty biopharmaceutical company, has partnered with the Entertainment Industries Council (EIC) , the Lab School of Washington and other organizations in support of National Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Awareness Week to host "Fact or Fiction: ADHD in America, a Capitol Hill Forum." The panel discussion aims to dispel myths and provide facts about the diagnosis, treatment and management of ADHD. Held in the Rayburn House Office Building on Thursday, September 16th, this briefing promotes education and increased awareness of ADHD by featuring insights from ADHD experts and advocates.
A unit of Forest Laboratories, the maker of the antidepressant Celexa, agreed on Wednesday to pay more than $313 million to settle criminal and civil complaints, including a claim that it had illegally promoted the drug for use in children.
The diagnosis of ADHD has soared by 500 percent since the 1980s. Now a new study suggests a large number of kids are misdiagnosed and are often medicated for a disease they don't have. Dr. Bill Evans teaches economic statistics at Notre Dame. Evans and colleagues at North Carolina State and the University of Minnesota joined forces to study ADHD and why so many more children are being diagnosed and medicated. They spent a year looking at the exact birth dates of 60,000 kids in grades K-12. "What our work tends to demonstrate is that there seems to be a lot of misdiagnosis and we estimate that there are probability about a million kids that are misdiagnosed defining them as having ADHD when really they're just young for their grade," Dr. William Evans explained. Start dates for schools varying from state to state make a big difference for the youngest children. "Every day has a school that you have to turn five by in order to start kindergarten and if your birthday is before that, a lot of kids are going to start and they're going to be the youngest in their class. If your birthday is right after that, then you're going to be the oldest kid in your class," Dr. Evans said. Using those exact birth dates, their study, published in the Journal of Health Economics suggests shows children considered young for their class are misdiagnosed with ADHD at a much higher rate. "But if you take a look on either side of the cutoff there are staggering differences in the cutoff of the ADHD diagnosis," Dr. Evans said. Teachers are often making the suggestion of ADHD when the problem could simply be maturity. "Part of the problem is that a lot parents are getting their child diagnosed because the teacher says he's acting up in school so you have to ask, is the kid acting up in school because of this condition or is the kid acting up because he's just young for the grade," Dr. Evans said. It makes a difference from school performance to athletics and it's much harder for kids to catch up, even when they get to high school and college. "The evidence is pretty clear that the older ones are the kids that are doing better in class," Dr. Evans said. So how do we help our children, especially those who make the date but may just not be ready for school? "I think the solution is to ask a lot of questions have the kid evaluated by a professional and ask "is this really behavior that is consistent with the disease or is this behavior that's consistent with the age," Dr. Evans said. For those who do have ADHD the behaviors last into adulthood so a true diagnosis is important. Just as important is making sure our kids are not misdiagnosed with a disorder that may really have more to do with them just being too young for school. Dr. Evans says more than one million kids may have been misdiagnosed and more than 800,000 may be taking stimulant medication based only on maturity. Once you have a true diagnosis, the National Institute of Mental Health says treatment options include medication, behavioral treatment or a combination. Their study found the combination produced better results than behavioral treatment alone.
“Child’s Ordeal Reveals Risks of Psychiatric Drugs in Young” (front page, Sept. 2) illustrates a disastrous course for one young child. Millions of children with psychiatric and learning disorders get the wrong treatment or no treatment because of a lack of access to proper care, general misinformation about child development, and a lack of training for pediatricians.
Wisconsin will get over a half-million dollars after a drug company agreed to settle a lawsuit.
Ortho-McNeil-Janssen was accused of marketing the drug Topamax for conditions not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. They included psychiatric problems like bi-polar disorder, and drug and alcohol dependency.
First Lady Michelle Obama reveals some requirement of the new Health Care law that seemed to have been hidden in its 2,000+ pages. Nancy Pelosi famously said "We have to pass the bill to see what is in the bill." Well, now we are finding out little gems like this.
Is your child high spirited and unfocused -- or suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder? These ADHD guidelines will help you decide if a checkup is in order.
This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released data on prescription-drug use through 2008. According to the data, almost half of Americans -- 48.3% -- took at least one prescription drug per month in 2008, up from 43.5% a decade ago.
Doctors are increasingly prescribing antipsychotic drugs to treat young children, even infants, for conditions that some psychiatric experts say rarely warrant such strong treatment, The New York Times reports.
In the wake of a little boy's suicide and the admission by child welfare chiefs that they violated a 2005 law aimed at protecting kids from psychiatric-drug use, some Florida lawmakers suggest the death may be a symptom of deeper problems.
