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Medically Assisted Death in CanadaPolicy Options, a Canadian forum, published the piece below by Jocelyn Downie, David Wright and Mona Gupta, all of whom I know, as a contribution to a wider debate on the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation currently under review in Canada, and especially the question of where does mental illness fit into this mix. […]
MAiD in Canada: Enduring Sexual DysfunctionsSee accompanying MAiD in Canada and TRD. Illustration: Lost in Medication © created by Billiam James Canada put Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) legislation in place in June 2016. This allowed for medical assistance in dying in cases where death was reasonably foreseeable. In 2019, in Truchon v Attorney General of Canada, the Superior Court […]
Sex and Evidence Based MedicineThe University of British Columbia in Vancouver hosts The Therapeutics Initiative an independent group who evaluate all medicines for effectiveness, harms and value in a regular series of Drugs Bulletins dealing with new drugs or emerging problems with older drugs. They were set up in 1994 just when evaluations of this type and Drugs Bulletins […]
High Noon: Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My….?In early December 2020, Ian and Tania Morgan had to attend the inquest of their son Samuel in Swansea, South Wales. Sam died in January 2020, a week after he had been put on citalopram by his family doctor, Dr Adams. Sam was pretty close to a healthy volunteer. A 25 year old, sporty, successful […]
Shipwreck of the Singular: Healthcare’s CastawaysShipwreck of the Singular, which Samizdat has just published, took more time to write than all my other books combined. The others tumbled out – often in just a few weeks. Unpublishable Pharmageddon took 3 weeks. But it then took 4 years to find a publisher. I took on an agent to help get a […]
Sex, Drugs and a Leap Year ProposalSee Sex, Drugs and Bureaucrats for the start of this correspondence. You will need both posts to understand next weeks Suicide, Drugs and Bureaucrats. February 26 Rasi to Healy Thank you for your letter of 31st January 2020 regarding SSRIs and PRACs latest recommendation on the risk of persistent sexual dysfunction after treatment with serotonin […]
Sex, Drugs and BureaucratsThis post accompanies a Health Canada Warns post on RxISK. The Health Canada statement is classic bureaucratise. They “could not confirm, nor rule out, a causal link between stopping SSRI or SNRI treatment and persistent sexual dysfunction“ because “the available studies were not designed to assess this effect” Exactly – deliberately designed not to detect. […]
Shifting Vaccine ConfidenceBefore 1980 Roughly through to 1980, vaccines were public goods. They were mostly made by national bodies who were publicly funded, although pharmaceutical companies were dipping their toes in the water. They were used for diseases that a national community thought were serious and worth getting vaccinated against – like polio. Few national communities would […]
Religion, Technology and ManagementReligion Mention religion and the links between individuals and their creator, if they think they have one, come to mind. We imagine an individual fasting, meditating, or kneeling in prayer. It was more common in the past however to think of a people, like the People of Israel and their God. Our rulers, whether Kings […]
The Fault Lies in Our StarsThe Fault lies in our Stars not in Ourselves: Randomized Controlled Trials & Clinical Knowledge In the Beginning In 1947, a trial of streptomycin introduced RCTs to medicine. From then, through to their incorporation into the 1962 amendments to the Food, Drugs and Cosmetics Act, occasioned by the thalidomide tragedy, there were questions about the […]
Fawlty StarsThe argument in The Fault Lies in our Stars features in Chapter 6 of the forthcoming Shipwreck of the Singular. It was sent out for comment to the following, who were chosen mostly by Mark Wilson. The responses received are below: Corrado Barbui, Lisa Bero, Alan Cassels, Angus Deaton, Jean-Francois Dreyfus, Andrew Leigh (author of […]
The Raine in June Falls Mainly in …June Raine featured in the international media last week as the public face of Britain’s MHRA (drugs regulatory agency) when they became the first agency to license a Covid vaccine. A journalist, who had unearthed a letter of mine from 20 years ago, got in touch with me asking to talk by phone about whether […]
Prescription for Sorrow – Patrick HahnThis week Samizdat publishes its Fourth book – Prescription for Sorrow by Patrick Hahn, following on the heels of its Third book, the best-selling Malcharist. Jim Gottsteins’s The Zyprexa Papers is an honorary Fifth. The book is immediately available on Amazon and we will look to get it installed on Kobo and Lulu also. For […]
Frontiers in Psychiatry: Elena VicarioSome weeks ago, following the publication of an article by Andrea Cipriani in their journal, Jim Gottstein and I wrote to the Frontiers in Psychiatry Bigwigs asking for the Cipriani article to be removed – Meta-Analytic SuperSpreader. They have since replied Vicariously through Elena Vicario. From: Editorial Office <editorial.office@frontiersin.org> Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2020 at […]
Michael Hengartner, Andrea Cipriani and Frontiers in PsychiatryMeta-Analytic SuperSpreader outlined a disturbing sequence of events leading up to the publication of an article by Andrea Cipriani and colleagues effectively promoting the benefits of antidepressants. Andrea and colleagues are part of an Oxford University Precision Psychiatry ‘lab’. The idea that this article in some way helps move us toward a precision psychiatry is […]
PIMsPlus: Medication Reference SiteTaper MD today launched PIMsPlus.org, a new free searchable resource for safer medication use which is focused on Potentially Inappropriate Medications (PIMs): medications that should be used with caution in older adults because research and clinical experience with these medications have shown that the risk of adverse effects can outweigh the benefits. The aim of […]
Meta-Analytic Super-SpreaderIn a recent post Infection Super-Spreaders, I outlined the disturbing publication of an article by Andrea Cipriani and colleagues that gives a green light to prescribing antidepressants to children. Prescribing antidepressants to children could even be part of Precision Psychiatry – a new Oxford University brand to complement Evidence Based Medicine. Concerned about developments, Jim […]
O’Neill, O’Neill and Frontiers PsychiatryO’Neill is just about the most famous Northern Irish surname – on both sides of the ‘divide’. I wrote to Onora O’Neill, 3 weeks ago, following the last post. There has not been a response. My email may have gone into spam but if it has further emails likely will also. Faced with issues like […]
TRUST ME I’M NOT A DOCTORInfection Super-Spreaders, with Michael Hengartner’s comment… I cannot recommend rejection, as this would mean to reject about 90% of clinical research and call into question everything EBM has achieved, including the Cochrane collaboration. .. opens up an unsettling vista. Calling into question EBM, and the Cochrane Collaboration, has echoes that are little short of well […]
Infection Super-Spreaders: Whose Department?This is a murky story that like Study 329, to which it links, doesn’t leave anyone looking good. First the journal – Frontiers in Psychiatry – which is one of the Frontiers group of journals. As outlined in Neo-Culturalism – a must read to get what is going on here and being done to all […]
Stormy Weather IISWI There was a fuss after Stormy Weather. A colleague got in touch to ask if my twitter feed had been hacked – he’d been copied in on some weird stuff. I went on twitter to check – I rarely check things out. And noticed 250 notifications – the first few of which were all […]
Stormy Weather IIf it appears in the New York Times it must be true but in truth we have no evidence that Stormy Daniels or Donald Trump or Joe Biden have PSSD or PFS or any related conditions – although there was considerable gossip at one point claiming Donald was taking Finasteride. Probably just Fake News. There […]
Swallowed Whole or Murdered: MalcharistPatrick Hahn has written the first Riff on Malcharist which is now posted on Samizdat reproduced below. What Paddy Chayefsky’s Network was to the Twentieth Century, Paul John Scott’s Malcharist is to the Twenty-First. This is a novel that takes the reader deep inside the Pharmaceutical Empire which invents diseases, creates “patient advocacy organizations” to […]
MalcharistSamizdat announces the release of Malcharist by Paul John Scott. This is a grippingly realistic page-turner about the corruption of clinical trials told through the crisis of conscience of a medical ghostwriter. Set in Manhattan in 2010 and laced with dark humor throughout its fast 352 pages, it finds Shivani Patel in its opening chapters […]
Righteous AngerThere are 2 more Riffs on Children of the Cure, with more on the way and 1 on The Decapitation of Care. The image above isn’t quite right – might be better to have Lilly, Pfizer, Merck and GSK represented on the name plates. The illustrations in the Riffs however are the usual compelling imagery […]
The Spooking of Ichabod CraneThere are 3 more Riffs on the 329 theme, with 3 more to come. Julie Wood the prime moved behind the Study329.org site, which provided much of the underpinning of Children of the Cure has written a Riff on the book which can be found in full on Samizdat under Sympathy and Pills or here […]
Riffs on Children of the Cure – Ode to BeethovenSamizdat now features 3 Riffs on Children of the Cure, with more on the way. The first was by Max Fink – above – a second has come from Heather Roberts, below, who has posted further reflections on Olly’s Friendship Foundation Facebook page and a third from Bob Fiddaman, further down again. Bob also features […]
When Samizdat published Children of the Cure on Amazon, there was discomfort in some quarters. The discomfort was practical for some. Mark Carter from Auckland told us it would take 154 NZ dollars to buy two copies and have them posted to him – he had to go through Amazon.com as Amazon.com.au for some strange […]
Children of the Cure: Hand of History?Children of the Cure has just been published – the Preface is on Samizdat. The first Chapter is on RxISK – Fear of Lying. Children is one of several closely related books due out in the next few weeks including Paul John Scott’s The Malcharist and Jon Jureidini and Leemon McHenry’s Illusions of Evidence Based […]
Doxycycline and Stephen O’NeillStephen O’Neill became anxious in 2016 and was given Sertraline. This caused an immediate toxic reaction that killed him, The doctors treating him invented a fictitious mental illness and both they and the coroner found it convenient to blame this fiction for Stephen’s death. See The Death of Stephen O’Neill and related posts. The coroner […]
Copyright © Data Based Medicine Americas Ltd.