If David Cameron speaks out on the subject of human rights abuses while in China

I hope the response he receives will include a reminder that the UK itself has an extremely poor record on human rights. - Read about Chemical Cosh drugs that are harming and bringing early death to many thousands of dementia sufferers. And the appallingly callous treatment in the Staffordshire Hospital that resulted in terrible suffering and premature death for hundreds of patients. And the many millions of UK citizens (mostly women) gravely harmed for decades by tranquillisers and other toxic psychotropic drugs which are still being prescribed by foolish doctors. - Just a few examples of the atrocious treatment far too many UK citizens routinely receive from the NHS.

Addictive tranx drugs recklessly over-prescribed long ago are linked to lasting brain damage

Yesterday's Independent on Sunday article informs us that the link between benzodiazepines and similar psychotropic drugs and brain shrinkage was made years 30 years ago and the Medical Research Council agreed in 1982 there should be large-scale studies done, but they were not done. I urge you to read the article.

The IoS tells us that Catherine Hopkins, the legal director of Action against Medical Accidents, has stated, "The failure to carry out research into the effect of benzodiazepines has exposed huge numbers of people to the risk of brain damage. This research urgently needs to be carried out, and if the results confirm the suspicions of the 1981 expert group, it could lead to one of the biggest group actions for damages against the Government and the MRC ever seen in the courts.""

I remember these extremely harmful, extremely addictive tranquilliser and hypnotic drugs - Valium, Librium, Mogadon, et al being prescribed with reckless abandon for all kinds of purported conditions. I remember people taking them in the 60s and 70s - taking them in good faith - and some of them becoming Zombie-like in consequence. Years later I took them myself (they were mainly prescribed to women, in a ghastly example of rampant medical sexism), along with amitriptyline, a dangerous anti-depressant, as the caring professions played a cruel game of pretending that my agonising toothache was 'really' Depression - still a favourite 'diagnosis'/insult used to cover up dental/medical negligence. Read my Mensa article on Cruelty, Clinical Negligence and the Abuse of Power in the NHS

It took me 8 months of monumentally difficult struggle to wean myself off the Mogadon, which is reportedly far more addictive than heroin. Some poor souls took these drugs while pregnant and have had to live with the corrosive guilt of irreparably damaging their babies while they were still in the womb. Many unfortunate victims are still addicted to tranquillisers today, decades after starting to take the drugs, and incredibly, doctors are still prescribing these drugs. I would strongly advise anyone to decline to take any of this pharmaceutical junk. It is far more likely to harm you than to help you.

The country should be grateful to Esther Rantzen, who on her programme, That's Life, fought to curb the terrible consequences of the medical profession's love affair with tranquillisers. Until she took up the matter, doctors, guided by profit-motivated, not-to-be-trusted drug company reps, were assuring patients who reported their dreadful symptoms of addiction that the drugs had not caused their symptoms and that they should continue to take them.

Unintentional poisoning by prescription drugs is increasing

Poisoning is now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death in the U.S. The rates of unintentional poisoning deaths have been on the rise for more than 15 years, and unintentional poisoning has surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of unintentional injury death among people 35-54 years of age. In a study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that hospitalizations for poisoning by prescription opioids, sedatives and tranquilizers in the U.S. have increased by 65% from 1999 to 2006.
Read article at physorg.com

Don't damage your health with prescription medicines

The Independent reports on increasing problems of addiction to prescription medicines and illustrates the article with examples of celebrity deaths caused by these drugs.

Prominent among harmful prescribed drugs are tranquillisers, anti-depressants, pain-killers and steroids. If you value your health you should avoid taking these potentially harmful pharmaceuticals (some of which are obtainable without prescription) unless they are absolutely necessary, because the adverse side-effects of the drugs, including possible addiction, are frequently far worse than the health problem for which they are being taken. - ALWAYS check out the possible side-effects and bear in mind that drug companies have a track record of not disclosing unfavourable information about their products if they can get away with it.

You can read about some of the many dangerous prescription drugs on these pages:

amitriptyline

prescribed steroids and HRT

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

And see Sodium in foods and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

Top 11 compounds in US drinking water

This blogpost, including the Comment section, is cut and pasted from the Dr Rath Foundation newsletter.

A comprehensive survey of the drinking water for more than 28 million Americans has detected the widespread but low-level presence of pharmaceuticals and hormonally active chemicals.
Read article at newscientist.com
Comment: The drugs found include beta-blockers; drugs used to treat bipolar disorder; anti-cholesterol drugs; tranquilisers; painkiller and anti-inflammatory drugs; anticonvulsants; antibiotics; and others. Similar findings have been made in other countries. In the UK, for example, powerful cancer and psychiatric drugs have been found in tap water, leading doctors to express concern about exposing pregnant women to drugs that could harm an unborn child. For further information about how pharmaceutical drugs contaminate drinking water, click here.

Tranquillisers are putting children's lives at risk

I don't understand why doctors who prescribe recklessly are not severely punished... I have copied the following from the latest Dr Rath Health Foundation newsletter
http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/Newsletter/archive/newsletter_2008_04_apr_18.html

Tranquillisers putting children's lives at risk
· Anti-psychotics may cause long-term harm, say critics
· Youngsters under 6 being given unlicensed drugs
New evidence has shown children's lives are being put at risk by a surge in the use of controversial tranquillising drugs which are being prescribed to control their behaviour, the Guardian has learned. The anti-psychotic drugs are being given to youngsters under the age of six even though the drugs have no licence for use in children except in certain schizophrenia cases, the report says. The number of children on the drugs has doubled since the early 1990s as the UK begins to follow a trend started in the US, but critics say they are a "chemical cosh" that could cause premature death.
Read article in The Guardian (UK)

2.5m children on drugs in US
Anti-psychotic drugs for children have taken off in the US on the back of a willingness to diagnose those with behavioural problems as having manic depression. Even children barely out of babyhood are getting a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, the modern term for the condition.
Read article in The Guardian (UK)

Prescription drugs and over-the-counter drugs: legal and lethal...)o:

This is an article from the Times. It is long, but well worth reading.

Prescription drugs: legal and lethal

Extracts:

"In one of its less sensational aspects, our escalating fondness for taking drugs that won’t get you arrested can be measured in the 10% annual rise over the past three years in the use of antidepressants, notably our old friend Prozac. The NHS issued 31m scripts for Prozac in 2006, a blanket figure that, however it breaks down in terms of the numbers of users referred to, suggests that a lot of people are regularly taking a powerful antidepressant. Then there are the Valium guzzlers. The Council for Involuntary Tranquilliser Addiction (Cita), run by Liverpool University, guesstimates that there are as many as 1.5m nervous types in this country who have become accidentally addicted to benzodiazepines, the family of tranquillisers to which Valium belongs. Others take them knowingly, for fun. According to Professor Heather Ashton of Newcastle University, author of a pamphlet on addiction to benzodiazepines, these “are now taken illicitly in high doses by 90% of drug abusers worldwide. They are part of the drug scene”. So well integrated are they that abusers will crush the pills and snort or inject them, the same way they might cocaine or heroin.

More worrying in a way, because they attract less attention, are those habit-forming drugs that can be bought without prescription at high-street pharmacies. Concern about these has given rise to a new coinage in the world of drug dependency, “OTCs”, an abbreviation for painkillers bought “over the counter”. This usually refers to the more powerful varieties of OTCs, such as codeine, which contains synthetic opiates. At a conference of the General Medical Association in 2004 it was suggested that there might be 50,000 OTC addicts in Britain today. The authorities are also concerned about OTC drugs causing suicidal tendencies: the European Medicines Agency is calling for OTC drugs to come with a “suicide rating”."

"The prescription drugs causing most concern are antidepressants. Prozac, which has been around for 20-odd years, is old news. The two newcomers currently causing medical debate are the branded drugs Efexor and Cymbalta. These are classed as “selective seratonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors”, or SSNRIs. The added “N” is what makes them special. Unlike Prozac and other SSRIs, these drugs do not simply increase levels of seratonin, the brain chemical that makes us feel more sociable and relaxed. They also boost adrenaline, making us more energetic and sometimes slightly manic."

Just because a doctor has prescribed it, it doesn't mean a drug is safe.

Evidence-based medicine? - You're joking...)o:

Medical 'experts' who assert their arrogant, prejudiced views with no scientific evidence to back them do terrible harm. Unfortunately there are far too many people who lack the courage to dare to believe them to be other than saints...)o: - Their biased opinions should not be called evidence at all. Very often their 'diagnoses' are mere guesswork. But doctors are extremely powerful and most people are scared of criticising them in case they 'get into trouble' in some way for doing so.

Think back to what doctors used to advise about how babies should be placed in their cots. - They used to advise mothers to lay their babies on their stomachs. - There was no EVIDENCE for the correctness of this advice. It was later shown that it is safer for babies to be laid onto their backs and not their stomachs. - Were there any apologies from the medical profession? - Of course not! - It was Anne Diamond who, after sadly losing a baby to cot death, fought for the truth to be told about how best to lay a baby down, and since her successful campaign there has a significant fall in the incidence of cot death in the United Kingdom. - Many people have reason to be profoundly grateful to Anne Diamond and her 'Back to Sleep' message.

Similarly, it was Esther Rantzen that fought to curb the terrible consequences of the medical profession's reckless overprescribing of tranquillisers, which even decades later are still wreaking havoc on many, many lives.

I am myself struggling to draw attention to the horrific harm that prescribed steroids, HRT and many other drugs do when prescribed by doctors unfamiliar with the side-effects and negligent about monitoring patients who innocently take these dangerous drugs because the doctor has prescribed them. My website is www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk

If you visit my website you will see that there has never been any scientific evidence to support the usual medical advice about how to reduce obesity. See http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html and Obesity and the Salt Connection

I wrote to the Power Inquiry about the abuse of power by the medical profession, but they did not pursue the matter at all...)o:

Lose weight by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!
See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
(The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)