Harrisburg psychiatrist Stefan Kruszewski offers no pain relief for pharmaceutical companies. He testifies against them when they make false claims about their drugs, and he’s good at it. The AstraZeneca drug Seroquel is for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but the company marketed it to seniors and kids for other things and wooed doctors into over-prescribing it.
As Dr. Allen Frances read through the list of proposed changes to psychiatry’s bible of mental sickness, alarms started ringing in his own mind. “I was surprised,” the renowned U.S. psychiatrist says, “that the proposals managed to be much worse than my most pessimistic expectations.”
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the government agency in the UK responsible for medicines and medical devices, has issued a warning about potential SSRI birth defects related to the use of fluoxetine (Prozac). The MHRA issued the warning in its monthly drug safety update. The agency warns that there is a small risk of congenital cardiac defects in infants of mothers who took fluoxetine during the first trimester of pregnancy.
Pharmaceutical Giant, AstraZeneca LP and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP will pay $520 million after being fined by the federal government for illegally marketing the anti-psychotic drug, Seroquel.
Some time back I remarked on a new childhood “affliction” to be dealt with by the judicious use of drugs and psychiatrists: “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.” If you had four or more of the following as a child, you were ODD, and I guess I was, too…
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