Last week I focused on drug advertisement for “Low T” catching up with all the attention given to menopausal women with declining hormones. But women still are the primary targets for pharmaceutical advertising, in part because they can be captured for multiple products—if not quite from the cradle, at least from puberty, through pregnancy, to menopause and to grave.
It is no accident so many have drunk the ADHD Kool-Aid. Big Pharma has funded several patient front groups to sell the disease of ADHD without people knowing they are being sold.There is good news and bad news about attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — that is, if you’re a drug company. The bad news is the kid market has peaked out with 4.5 million U.S. children now carrying the label.
How has Big Pharma managed to get so many children on expensive drug cocktails for “mental illness”? Drugs that they may not even need? Big Pharma has spent millions on public relations campaigns that tell parents, teachers and clinicians to dose children at the first sign of problems
Older adults taking psychiatric medications, such as Valium or Xanax, may be at increased risk of dementia, a new French study suggests. In the reports, adults older than 65 who took drugs known as benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety drugs) were 50 percent more likely to develop dementia over a 15-year period, compared with those who did not take the drugs.
Kim Collier’s 7-year-old daughter could not stop crying. Less than 24 hours earlier, the child had started taking Vyvanse, a drug prescribed for the treatment of ADHD. The distraught mother suggested a bike ride to distract the inconsolable child. The two set out for a park near their home outside Alliston, Ont. The girl pedalled and sobbed. Then, Collier recalled, “She screamed at me. She said, ‘I want to die.’”
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