Would you agree with me about these 10 points against Pharmceutical Drugs?

Question

And is there anything you would like to add/edit? Please feel free.

1.The human body is not used to man-made drugs. The human body was made from the earth. It knows what it needs. To treat the body with foreign man-made substances is to confuse it. It is not natural.

2.The depression drug inhibitors do not increase the levels of neurotransmitters in your body. What they do is they temporarily make the chemicals stay in the gap of the cell. It does not treat the problem but merely temporarily relieves the symptoms.

3.The neurotransmitters that stay in the gap cannot be converted to other vital substances. The neurotransmitters are stuck filling in the cell. Meanwhile your body might need to convert it to some other substance.

4.After a while, the drug won't work as it did before. The cells are not dumb. When they realize something is causing the neurotransmitters to stay in the gap longer, they will desensitize themselves from feeling the neurotransmitters as it did before. This will decrease the efficiency of the drug and you will need to increase the dose after time. Yes you might actually need to be increasing your doses instead of decreasing them. Not only that but if you stop taking the drug, your neurotransmitters will return to the way it was before the drug, but, you will feel worse than before you took it, since your cells are not as sensitive to the neurotransmitters as they were before.

5.The doctors, from my own experience, do not know what they are doing. When I was a kid they heard my mom complain about me and made a conclusion of what I had. I was having anger problems. It was psychological but since these doctors, like most of them, are incompetent, they just look up the chemical issue. And the thing is, the body can naturally heal itself, unless it is messed with. So they put me on a drug which caused me to become crazy. Afterwards they found out that they've made a mistake. That is very very unprofessional. Then they put me on a few other drugs which side effects left me in a condition worse than ever. I never was the same again. Its like I felt tired and emotionally nummb all the time. It never healed. I mean you are supposed to subscribe healthy medicine to heal a problem. Not make yourself truly sick. I could not feel niether angry not happy. Niether laughter nor crying. And yet, on the inside, I could feel a little, and I still had the anger. It was not gone. Just my whole body was dampened altogether. A few years later I found out that my problem was never physical, it was psychological! They doctors there many quite a few mistakes. They put me on wrong medicine. They put me on medicine that made me worse. They never realized that my problem was psychological from the very beginning.

6.The side effects that drugs may cause could be even worse than the disease. If you look up some drugs, you will see a fairly big list of side effects. Some could be severe such as headaches, impotence, gain of weight, fever etc... You then have to get other drugs to take care of that. A child once died of Ritalin. Sometimes it would be better to not even take the drugs.

7.Some drugs can take years to actually heal you. Since drugs do not treat the problem, and they never do, the “symptoms” could take months and even years to go away.

8.There is not test for neurotransmitter or hormonal deficiency. There is absolutely no test for such things. The only thing the doctors do is guess basing on psychological symptoms. But you cannot always tell a physical disease by a mental one. You gotta perform tests. But the doctors won't do that. They'd rather take a guess than search for the truth of the disease. This way you cannot know for sure that you have a neurotransmitter deficiency.

9. How can a doctor know which doze of what drug is enough just like that? How can they label a person in just the first few visits? They cannot. Because there is a difference between psychological problems and physiological. Because there is not a test to prove a certain physical dysfunction.

10. The Pharmaceutical Corporations are Multi-Billion Dollar Industries. Where is that getting at?

Answer 1

Yes I agree with everything you said.  

But if you want to heal your body naturally, and correct a chemical imbalance, that takes a lot of time and a real commitment-- many people don't have the time. It's a long road.

I'm not fond of psych-drugs. But I'm having trouble with being claustrophobic and have an important event coming up. Herbals don't work so I'm considering a psych drug.

People have to live and get by, and for many, drugs are the only way. But yes I do agree with all you wrote

Answer 2

1. The idea that because a molecule is natural or man-made giving it some sort of virtue is rather ridiculous. There are molecules that are toxic - wether they originated from a labratory or from a few billion years of evolution to kill off predators doesn't really matter. There's no moral or health quality that comes from its origin. The body also frequently does not know what it needs, a significant part of the illnesses people suffer are from parts of the body operating improperly due to environmental or genetic problems. The body is quite capable of doing as much or more damage to itself than anything outside it. Molecules aren't guided by any intelligence.

2. Making them stay in the gaps increases effectiveness, simulating increased signals. This is by and large not the only thing they do. They alter gene expression and increase nerve growth in certain areas of the brain. Not all use this mechanism, and some, like the MAOIs do directly increase the available supply of neurotransmitters. It's usually not the supply that's an issue - it's how they're used by the nerves.

3. No neurotransmitters with the exception of certain amino acid transmitters - which by and large are not touched by most drugs on the market, are never converted to any other useful substance by the body. Instead they are broken down into the equivalent of biological scrap by enzymes like COMT and MAO. Amino acid transmitters are available in staggering quantities, and can be easily synthesized using little else but free energy.

4. Cells are rather dumb. They're not guided by intelligence, just by genes and proteins. The way you describe tolerance developing is not quite how it happens, and definitely not how it happens with most antidepressants. There are also many, MANY mechanisms used in pharmacology which the body cannot regulate - such as statins for cholesterol, COX inhibition for painkillers, or MAO-inhibition. The body has no means to lose sensitivity to these by and large.

5. Doctors are human, and fallible. They do not know everything, they go to school for a very long time to be educated with the best science and techniques known on earth. And the body's ability to heal itself is overrated. It's impressive, yes, but very limited when it comes to certain organs, just look at the brain, or type 1 diabetics.

6. The side effects are rarely worse than the disease, a notable exception would be chemotherapy, and that's a matter of judgement. Many illnesses end in death or permanent damage to the body. The side effects of drugs are pretty laughable compared to this. Reading PI sheets gives you a skewed sense of what happens with them. They're required by law to list everything that happened to anyone when they were testing the drug - which is why you see the flu and viral infection on there so often. The serious adverse effects are rare, one professor of mine put the deaths due to rhabdomyelysis from Statins at approximately 1 in one hundred million patient years. Birth control pills cause blood clots very rarely, but the number of people who die from birth control blood clots is several orders of magnitude smaller than those who would die from pregnancy complications.

7. Depends on the drug. There are some things that don't heal - diabetes or instance. Many drugs directly treat the problems - antibiotics, chemotherapy drugs, cholesterol drugs.

8. There is a connection of symptoms to the underlying cause. Lowered amounts of neurotransmitters are not the only problem in depression for instance. But because we know what symptoms and presentations of symptoms connect to what physiological condition it can be treated. For example fever, chills and nausea to a stomach virus. The vast majority of medical school is about learning to recognize how these things look when a person actually shows up. Doing the kind of lab tests that they use in large scale studies on every person who came in would cost trillions upon trillions of dollars. There aren't enough MRIs and genetic labs on the planet to test everyone - let alone enough money to. And there ARE tests for hormones, cheap, easy, frequently used tests for virtually every hormone in the body barring some few bizarre ones which matter in only certain situations - usually genetic.

9. Because they do studies involving tens of thousands of people to evaluate wether the drug works. These studies give information on how to dose drugs, psychiatric or otherwise, to cover the majority of people. There are always people who don't fit in, which is why doctors have the liberty to prescribe as they choose. The difference between psychological and physiological problems when it comes to mental illness is rather moot. Most mental illness has a strong physiological cause - dysfunction of some sort in the brain. It is not psychological, it is not something a person can just think themselves out of. The purely psychological disorders are a VERY ugly lot, grouped under what we call "Axis II". These by and large cannot be treated with medication and require lifelong therapy for the most part.

10. Health care is a multi billion dollar industry. People want to be alive and healthy. "Alternative" medicine is also a multibillion dollar a year industry, what does that say?

Remember - we do not live in a perfect world. We do not live somewhere in which a person can be assured of getting the right answer all the time. People s***w up, people make mistakes, and people give their best effort - doctors more than anyone else. To expect perfection all the time is to set yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment and bitterness. Don't do it.

EDIT:

Wrote a response and yahoo ate it. I'll summarize.

And that's ironically one of the only honest, sane posts I've ever seen on Erowid. What he's describing doesn't sound quite right. He seems to be describing more like a sluggish bipolar II situation. In which case the combination of antidepressants and stimulants would produce something like what he's describing. There's some background details I'd like to see.

I'm not sure what exactly you want me to explain. Bad things certainly happen. Doctors are human beings, and they do s***w up, they make mistakes. You seem to be asking for perfection. I mentioned this originally, but the world doesn't work perfectly. Medication doesn't work all the time, we just work with the best that we have.

And I will agree that there are wrong drugs, not bad in general, but wrong for some people. There are better drugs, some have worse side effects, some are tolerated well. People tend to treat the term "Side effect" like some sort of filthy term and don't understand the implications for it. You don't take the PI sheet of a drug, run your finger down the list and get everything on there.

The death of the child due to ritalin is a tragic thing. And unfortunately it's something that can happen. For it to happen like that in someone that age is astronomically rare to the point where there almost must be something else in there. You usually see that sort of heart enlargement in long-term methamphetamine abusers. While meth shares a mechanism with ritalin, it's about a hundred fold more potent, and when abused used in doses thousands of times   what it is in medical practice. For this sort of engorgement to happen in a child makes me think that there was some other contributing factor.

Again, brief summary of my original update, feel free to message me if you want further clarification.

Answer 3

While some of your points are correct, the human body does not in fact make everything it needs sometimes. I have epilepsy, for example, and the body can't stop the electrical storm in my brain on it's own. So without anti seizure meds my life would be unbearable. Also, having had serious clinical depression right after the birth of my child, treatment with anti depressants completely saved my life. It gave my body the little tweak it needed to get back into synch. Again, without the drugs, I lived 6 months in a hellish suicidal world. The drugs were needed for about a year, then I was back to normal.

Sometimes, drugs are needed to live a healthy and happy life. But they are over used very often in our society. They have good and bad points. I'm sorry you had such a bad experience on the drugs you were given, but that doesn't happen to everyone. Experiences vary, another reason why it can never be an exact science.

Answer 4

I disagree.  After working in the field of mental health for thirty years and watching as psychotropic medications changed, especially those for depression, I saw the positive impact.  Yes, there is a benefits verses risk issue but then so is taking aspirin or even OTC vitamins.

But depression is generally either acute due to a life event or chemical as the case of those with mood disorders like manic depression.  

The doctor knows by observation and data kept by the caregiver or the person served.  There are therapeutic levels of most medications and the doctors start at the lowest dose and gradually increase if warranted.  Just like a diabetic going to a doctor or a person with arthritis, the doctors are education people who with the help of the pharmacists know what to look for in side effects, etc.

Sounds like you are being treated for some form of depression and resistive to the recommended treatment by your family physicial, psychologist or psychiatrist.  But to think that some test, any test, is the be-all is incorrect.  Otherwise people would be placed in forever institutions like in the Victorian age, in fact prior to the Civil Rights era, suffering until they died from old age or committed suicide.

Answer 5

the body cant make everything it needs all the time. case in point: diabetics. there body cant produce insulin, so they need man made stuff. thats what some diseases are. they are caused because the body cant make everything it needs. that point is wrong.