#American pharma magazine

[jstarkd00110]

American pharma magazine

A publication released by Ochre Media Pvt. Ltd. every Semiannual. It serves as the main information source for important executives at the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, both in print and digital media. Pharma Focus America looks at major issues and developments affecting the future of the pharmaceutical sector in America and the rest of the world.

To discuss advertising and sponsorship opportunities please contact Email : advertise@pharmafocusamerica.com Tel : +91 (0) 40 4961 4567

[kp777]

By Ralph Nader

Common Dreams - Opinion

Aug. 18, 2024

It is up to you the citizens to demand such investigations by your senators and representatives.

Twenty-four years ago, Business Week magazine conducted a poll of the American people on whether corporations have too much control over their lives. Over seventy percent of them said YES! Since 2000, big businesses and their CEOs have gotten bigger, richer, less taxed and exercised far more power over the lives of workers, consumers, patients, children, communities, the two major political parties and our national, state and local governments.

That reality answers the question of why our corporate Congress has declined to hold public hearings confronting lawless corporate power with proposed legislation – the first step toward shifting more power to the people.

Weissman has put together a powerful legislative agenda to restore the rule of law over raw power.

Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen, demands ten key Congressional hearings – naming the Committees that can hold them – in the just-published edition of the Capitol Hill Citizen (to obtain a print copy only, go to capitolhillcitizen.com).

Here is a summary of them:

1. Rebuild democracy by ending big money in elections. Besides exploring public financing for elections, the Committees, for example, would make the connections between Big Pharma’s money and charging the highest drug prices in the world, despite the large subsidies given to the drug companies. Also, witnesses would give testimony to strengthen voting rights and eliminate partisan gerrymandering, among other measures.

2. Taxing corporations and the Super-Rich at least to the level of the prosperous 1960s. Tax financial speculation (see: greedvsneed.org), close “a raft of loopholes” and impose a wealth tax on “the outrageously wealthy.” Weissman writes: “How exactly did Jeff Bezos pay $1.1 billion in federal tax from 2006 to 2018, as his wealth grew by $127 billion?” How do so many giant, profitable companies get away with zero income tax for years at a time?

3. Anti-monopoly hearings to strengthen venerable antitrust laws, to catch up with many new forms of monopolization and protect small business, competition and innovation. New legislation should also “restore the rights of victims of anti-competitive practices – whether competitors or consumers – to sue monopolists.”

4. Roll back rampant corporate welfare by exposing the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in subsidies, handouts, giveaways and bailouts. From greatly inflated government contracts – as in the defense industry – to giveaways of public land resources, government-guaranteed giant capitalism must stop, and the savings devoted to public services in great need.

5. More and deeper hearings on corporate-driven climate disruptions. Congressional committees have had numerous hearings, but far more should be regularly held on how the corporate-driven climate crisis is harming people and property around the country, how efficient are the ways to mitigate or prevent such fossil-fuel-led disasters, and how the law must be toughened with stronger enforcement and budgets to forestall this omnicidal destruction that gets worse every year.

6. “Winning Medicare for All” hearings to show how other countries spend far less per capita and get better patient outcomes with far less paperwork, waste, over-billing and denials of care. Weissman notes how conditions are getting worse with “private equity investors rushing to buy up everything from nursing homes to emergency care companies.”

7. Legislative hearings to enact laws that end the over-pricing of prescription drugs in the U.S. that are “roughly three times what they are in other rich countries.” This would build on Senator Bernie Sanders’ hearings by fundamentally changing the conditions that breed ever-worsening “pay or die” unregulated drug industry price dictates.

8. Hearings that place the most obstructive anti-union formation laws in the Western world under reform spotlights. Union-busting law firms and consultants should be subpoenaed to give testimony, produce documents, and answer questions under oath. Long overdue are hearings on the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947) to allow card checks and faster procedures between union certification and contracts with employers.

9. Also, long overdue are Congressional hearings that “shine a light on the victims of corporate wrongdoing who have been denied their day in court or the ability to obtain fair compensation.” On the table would be a “Corporate Accountability and Civil Justice Restoration Act” that protects the constitutional right of trial by jury that has been severely eroded by corporate lawyers and corporate judges.

10. Hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee to confront the surging corporate crime wave with a modernized, comprehensive federal corporate criminal law. One that is adequately empowered and resourced to deter, punish and hold corporate crooks and their companies accountable through a variety of proven mechanisms. Present laws are pathetically weak, easily gamed, and allow ever more widespread immunities for these comfortable fugitives from justice.

Weissman has put together a powerful legislative agenda to restore the rule of law over raw power. He has a Congress Watch group staffed by public interest lobbyists who can swing into action daily on Capitol Hill equipped with a combination of invincible rhetoric rooted in irrebuttable evidence to benefit all the American people.

It is up to you the citizens to demand such investigations by your senators and representatives.

I would add serious hearings on the bloated, redundant military budget. Absorbing over half of all federal operating expenditures, this vast appropriation is in violation of federal law since 1992 requiring audited budgets be sent to Congress yearly. The Pentagon is presently out of sight by members of Congress and out of control even by the Army, Air Force and Navy.

Another basic hearing is needed by the Joint Committee on Printing aimed at restoring the printing of Congressional hearings and reports for maximum distribution in depository libraries and use by citizens. Hearing transcripts and very tardy online hearing records give corporate lobbyists an advantage in lobbying Congress. They can afford to pay for rapid access transcripts or personally go to the hearings that citizens may not be able to easily attend. Few citizens can afford such luxuries. (See the February/March 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen).

By the way, voters should demand that Congress be in session five days a week instead of three days a week with long recesses. More hearings, and the critical information work of our national legislature, requires a full week’s work, for which they get fully paid. (We will have additional proposals for blockbuster hearings in the future.)

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of "The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" (2012). His new book is, "Wrecking America: How Trump's Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All" (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).

[texasobserver]

“The Texas Observer’s 2023 Must-Read Lone Star Books” by Senior Editor Lise Olsen, with help from Susan Post of Austin's Bookwoman:

Despite a disturbing rise in book bans, Texas is, against all odds, becoming more and more of a literary hub with authors winning accolades, indie bookstores popping up from Galveston Island to El Paso, and ban-busting librarians and other book-lovers throwing festivals. So as you ponder gifts this holiday season or consider what to read by the fire or by the pool (who can say in December?), pick some Lone Star lit. 

Here’s a list of #MustRead 2023 books by Texans or about Texas compiled by the Observer staff with help from Susan Post of Austin’s independent Bookwoman. (Several talented Texans also made best book lists in Slate magazine, The New Yorker, and NPR’s Books We Love.)

NONFICTION

We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Dallas journalist Roxanna Asgarian (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is a dramatic takedown of the Texas foster care and family court system. It’s both a compelling narrative and an investigative tour de force.

The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine (Simon & Schuster) by Ricardo Nuila, a Houston physician and author, is an eye-opening and surprisingly optimistic read. Nuila delves deeply into what’s wrong with modern medicine by painting rich portraits of the patients he’s treated (and befriended) while working at Harris County’s Ben Taub Hospital, which offers free or low-cost—yet high-quality—care against all odds. Each of them had been forced into impossible positions and suffered additional trauma from obstacles and gaps in insurance, corporate medicine, and Big Pharma.

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians and a Legacy of Rage (Simon & Schuster) by Fort Worth journalist Jeff Guinn is one of two books that mark the 30th anniversary of the standoff between the Branch Davidians and federal agents that ended with 86 deaths. (The other is Waco Rising by Kevin Cook.) Both authors recount how the 1993 tragedy shaped other extremist leaders in America—and still influences separatist movements today.

Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan (University of Texas Press) by Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay has been described as the quintessential Steely Dan book. As part of the project, LeMay, a native Houstonian, created 109 whimsical portraits of characters that sprang from the musicians’ lyrics and legends. In a review, fellow artist Melissa Messer wrote: “Looking at Joan’s oeuvre makes me feel tipsy, or like I’ve drunk Wonka’s Fizzy Lifting Drink and I’m swimming through the air after her, searching for the same vision.”

Memoir

Black Cameleon: Memory, Womanhood and Myth(Macmillan) by Debra D.E.E.P. Mouton, the former Houston poet Laureate, shares lyrical memories of her own life mixed with ample asides on Black culture and family lore. Her storylines sink deeply into a dream world, and yet readers emerge without forgetting her deeper messages.

Leg: The Story of a Limb and a Boy Who Grew from It (Abrams Books) by Greg Marshall of Austin has been described as “a hilarious and poignant memoir grappling with family, disability, and coming of age in two closets—as a gay man and as a man living with cerebral palsy.” NPR’s Scott Simon, who interviewed Marshall, described the memoir as “intimate, and I mean that in all ways—insightful and often laugh-out-loud funny.”

Up Home: One Girl’s Journey (Penguin Random House) by Ruth J. Simmonsis a powerful memoir from the Grapeland native who became the president of Brown University and thus, the first Black president of an Ivy League institution. Simmons begins by sharing stories about her parents, who were sharecroppers, and about her life as one of 12 children growing up in a tiny Texas town during the Jim Crow era. For her, the classroom became “a place of brilliant light unlike any our homes afforded.” (Simmons’s other academic credentials include being the former president of Smith College; president of Prairie View A&M University, Texas’s oldest HBCU; and the former vice provost of Princeton.)

Novels and Short Stories

An Autobiography of Skin(Penguin Random House) by Lakiesha Carr weaves together three powerful narratives all featuring Black women from Texas. Carr, a journalist originally from East Texas, plumbs the depths of each character’s struggles, sharing tales of gambling, lost love, abuse, and the power of women to overcome. 

Holler, Child (Penguin Random House), a new short story collection from Latoya Watkins, was long-listed for the National Book Award. Her eleven tales press “at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance,” as the cover description promises, and introduce West Texas-inspired characters irrevocably shaped by place.

The Nursery (Pantheon Books) by Szilvia Molnar—a surprisingly honest, anatomically accurate (and unsettling) novel about new motherhood—begins: “I used to be a translator and now I am a milk bar.” It’s a riveting and original debut by Molnar, who is originally from Budapest, was raised in Sweden, and now lives in Austin.

Two legendary Austin writers weighed in with new novels on our tall stack of Texas goodreads: The Madstone (Little, Brown and Company) by Elizabeth Crook, the 2023 Texas Writer Award winner, and Mr. Texas, a fictional send-up of Texas politics by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright. 

Poetry

Bookwoman’s Susan Post, who contributed titles to our list, also recommends filling your holiday shelves with poetry by and about Texans:

Dream Apartment (Copper Canyon Press) by Lisa Olstein; 

Low (Gray Wolf Press) by Nick Flynn; 

Freedom House by KB Brookins (published by Dallas’ Deep Vellum Bookstore & Publishing Co.) 

Essays

Pastures of the Empty Page: Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry (University of Texas Press) edited by George Getchow, contains essays from a who’s who list of Texas writers about Larry McMurtry’s influence on Texas culture and their lives. It includes an array of reflections on history and the writing process as well as anecdotes about McMurtry’s off-beat and innovative life. 

To Name the Bigger Lie (Simon & Schuster) by Sarah Viren, an ex-Texan who now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University, (excerpted in Lithub) includes reflections on Viren’s experiences (and misadventures) as an “out” academic and writer in states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona. As she dryly notes, “Critiques of the personal essay, and by extension memoir, are often gendered—not to mention classist and racist and homophobic.” 

Can you help us survive, and thrive into our 70th year during this challenging time for the journalism industry?

Right now, all donations to the Texas Observer will be matched. Donate now!

[mikeo56]

Dr. Cornel West is a professor, philosopher, activist, world-renowned public intellectual, and the premiere standard bearer of the black prophetic tradition in the United States. He announced his Presidential bid in early June of 2023. Fed up with endless war and the corrupt corporate duopoly, Dr. West’s presidential platform centers poor and working people, anti-imperialism, social, economic and environmental justice. In a newly released video, West said that his campaign would be centered around health care, a living wage, housing, reproductive rights and “de-escalating the destruction” of democracy and the planet.

...in the eyes of the liberal corporate media establishment as well as our “post-fact” media universe, facts don’t matter, history doesn’t matter, and in-depth election analysis doesn’t matter. The name of the game is fear, hysteria, intimidation and shaming the “likely liberal” voters into always voting for the “lesser evil” corporate candidate (Vote Blue No Matter Who)– no matter how corrupt and ineffective s/he is, in order to avoid a Trumpian-style catastrophe.

In the first two weeks of his campaign, the corporate media and even some progressive media outlets have already run multiple hit pieces against him. MSNBC launched a baseless, frontal attack with “Cornel West’s ‘leftist’ presidential bid has right-wing DNA.” The once progressive magazine,The Nation, published both “Cornel West Should Not Be Running for President” as well as “Cornel West Is the Right Man in the Wrong Party.” And even the supposedly socialist magazine, Jacobin, ironically published “Cornel West Should Challenge Biden in the Democratic Primaries.” As a former advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign, West deeply understands the futility of running as a Democrat, inside a corporate party that has a track record of derailing independent, progressive candidates in favor of corporate-backed, establishment ones.

West reports that people come up to him a lot, telling him he needs to be running inside the Democratic Party. His response: “Have you heard my message? Have you heard my critique of the corporate duopoly? Have you heard the taboo issues that the Democratic Party will not touch at all? Do you know what it means to look at where the American empire is now, and to hear the dysfunctionality of the two-party system when 60 percent of its fellow citizens are struggling to put food on the table everyday, and [the Democratic Party] can still allow for military expansionism?!”

…with each presidential cycle, Democrats keep moving further and further to the political right. Today’s leading Democrats have an insatiable appetite for militarism, policing, and fossil fuels. They continually cut funding to the working class and the poor in order to fund the military and fossil-fuel expansion. And in doing so, they make allies with some of the most right-wing, fascistic leaders and authoritarian leaders in the world (Netanyahu of Israel; Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia), while inflicting crushing economic sanctions on small, socialist countries like Cuba, which happens to be providing the world with vaccines and socialized medicine. And the corporate party funders are virtually identical– fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, and Big Pharma. 

It’s interesting to note that the same third-party smear tactic is not as utilized by the Republican Party. We don’t often see Republican candidates blaming their failed campaigns on Libertarian candidates or other right-wing, independent candidates. So this one-sided Democratic Party phenomenon begs the question: Why do corporate Democrats feel so entitled to the votes of Independents? What kind of arrogance allows them to think that Democratic votes don’t need to be earned? Why would this corporate party assume that a leftist or independent voter would rather vote for a neoliberal disaster, in place of voting third party, or not voting at all? Why do Democrats feel empowered to trash, slander and eliminate all other progressive or leftist candidates from the electoral playing field, especially when those same candidates poll far better than their corporate-backed counterparts?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

#15yrsago Ballad of a TCP Reset Packet https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/05/free-ars-friday-song-ballad-of-the-tcp-reset-packet/

#15yrsago Bruce Sterling’s visionary novel Distraction: still brilliant a decade later https://memex.craphound.com/2008/05/17/bruce-sterlings-visionary-novel-distraction-still-brilliant-a-decade-later/

#10yrsago Gawker reporter claims to have seen video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack https://www.gawker.com/for-sale-a-video-of-toronto-mayor-rob-ford-smoking-cra-507736569

#10yrsago Company that oversees US “six-strikes” copyright shakedown has its company status revoked https://torrentfreak.com/six-strikes-anti-piracy-outfit-loses-company-status-faces-penalties-130515/

#5yrsago Star of racist deli rant identified as Trump-donating NYC lawyer Aaron Schlossberg https://gothamist.com/news/enraged-white-man-threatens-to-call-ice-on-women-for-speaking-spanish-in-manhattan-fresh-kitchen

#5yrsago Rising levels of a banned chemical are threatening the ozone layer (again) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/16/someone-somewhere-is-making-a-banned-chemical-that-destroys-the-ozone-layer-scientists-suspect/

#5yrsago Student debt crisis watch: pay $18,000 of your $24,000 loan, owe $24,000 https://www.bustle.com/p/ive-paid-18000-to-a-24000-student-loan-i-still-owe-24000-9000788

#5yrsago For decades, it was an open secret that patients of USC’s only full-time gynecologist were complaining about sexual assaults during exams https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-usc-doctor-misconduct-complaints-20180515-story.html

#5yrsago It’s laughably simple to buy thousands of cheap, plausible Facebook identities https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/heres-how-easy-it-is-to-buy-fake-facebook-profiles

#5yrsago A collaborative bibliography of “economic science fiction” https://edgeryders.eu/t/economic-science-fiction-a-selection-of-works-and-authors/8582

#5yrsago The £7 billion Carillion collapse has the UK government talking about breaking up the Big Four accounting firms https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/big-four-accountancy-firms-broken-up-kpgm-pwc-deloitte-a8354911.html

#5yrsago America’s new aristocracy: the 9.9% and their delusion of hereditary meritocracy https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

#5yrsago New York surpasses Brexit London as the world’s second-hottest luxury property market https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/hong-kong-new-york-and-london-top-world-luxury-markets-97360

#5yrsago How Big Pharma bribed docs to overprescribe opioids https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/17/dollars-for-docs/#slaughter

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[time4hemp]

Marijuana Saves Lives

The Journal of the American Medical Association indicates marijuana saves lives.

- May 20, 2016 -

According to the study, between 1999 and 2010, within the 13 states that legalized marijuana, there was a 25% reduction in opiate painkiller overdose deaths. Study co-author Colleen Barry said that this same trend occurred. Marijuana saves lives  in every state to legalize the plant since. A new survey conducted by the Center for Addictions Research of BC helps explain why Big Pharma is so afraid of cannabis. The pharmaceutical and alcohol industries, both powerful influences in Washington, have long lobbied against cannabis legalization in order to protect their profits. However, the tide has turned as decriminalization of medical and recreational cannabis sweeps the nation and the continent. With legalization, more people are discovering how this plant can provide a safe alternative to the dangerous effects of prescription pills.

You can read the entire magazine below or

click here to download the PDF.

Joint Conversations Newslet... by on Scribd

[worldofwardcraft]

It's already too late.

November 9, 2023

Even as Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican Party, there's still a minority of GOP voters (perhaps as many as 2 in 5) who don't want to see him as their presidential nominee next November. To those not in thrall to the MAGA cult, running a criminally indicted (91 felonies so far!) presidential candidate, who already lost to the same opponent, is a seriously bad idea. Which explains the desperation of the Never Trumpers to find someone, anyone who might be a better choice.

This past spring, that alternative appeared to be Florida's proudly fascist governor, Ron DeSantis. Donors willingly opened up their checkbooks for him. And, in the days after Trump's first indictment, he even enjoyed a higher net favorability than Trump among likely Republican voters in the three primary kickoff states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Said DeSantis aide Gennera Peck optimistically, “Everyone knows the majority of the Republican Party wants to move on.”

But then DeSantis started campaigning in earnest, and as people were increasingly repelled by him, it soon became apparent that he was the most awkward presidential candidate in modern American history. Vanity Fair accurately summed up his campaign style by calling DeSantis "an unlikeable jerk."

Then, following the first GOP debate, Vivek Ramaswamy's star commenced to ascend. Time Magazine ran a gushing profile of him, calling Ramaswamy "the most interesting and unknowable factor in the unfolding fight for the future of the GOP."

However, as his appearances on Faux News and other right-wing media ramped up, voters discovered that, in addition to being really annoying, the inexperienced pharma entrepreneur's naive policy ideas — such as allowing those under 25 to vote only if they pass a civics test — merely demonstrated how unqualified he actually was.

Emerging more recently as a contender is former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley. Last week the conservative National Review urged all the other Republican hopefuls — Scott, Christie, Burgum and the rest — to drop out and clear the way for her to take on Trump.

Meanwhile, several billionaires are quietly donating big bucks to support a presidential run by Virginia's secretly fascist governor, Glenn Youngkin. However Tuesday's Democratic victories may have snuffed out that notion.

But this is all just wish casting. A magic hero suddenly popping up to save the Party is simply not going to happen. As many Republicans rightly fear, barring a heart attack, a prison sentence or a meteor strike, Trump is certain to be their nominee and drag the entire GOP ticket down with him. Again.

[wanderingthedesertalone]

The Religion of Science: Bad Media Bad Grasp on Reality

Before you bang your fist on the desk and accuse me of being in the theist, deist or in the spiritualist camp let me tell you that I am agnostic at worst and an atheist at best, culturally I am a Jew and have respect for my ancestry but find all The Torah says hard to swallow. The universe is governed by detectable forces that require no deity. Yet, I believe it does take faith to believe in so much that us mortals declare a scientific fact, when facts, especially in recent years, have been nothing more than convenient narratives spun by those in power and sold to the youth who, often, take action on this misinformation.

As a skeptic I have to say that to believe much of what is flown under the banner of science takes a degree of faith. Firstly, one must have faith that the results of scientific inquiry haven’t been infiltrated by politics. These days, one would be a fool to believe such a thing, but such fools do exist. These fools don’t bat an eye at the idea of Big Tech, people who in my opinion have no right to declare what’s scientifically accurate, state that like a loving father they will oversee what information is disseminated and that they are the final word on what is disinformation. But, Big Tech isn’t an unbiased party. They tend to, as an example, dislike Israel, support abortion and the Covid vaccine. Make no mistake about it, censorship is political in nature, the ruling party is always the final word on what’s true. I’m not weighing in on any of the above and divulging political affiliation, I’m simply stating a fact. These days, it’s not a monarch who decides what’s accurate, it’s Big Tech, Big Pharma and Twitter’s Social Justice Warriors. Sadly, inconvenient truths are deemed as misinformation and followers of the religion of science blindly accept, although often against their better judgement, that the verdict passed down by those in power is the best possible answer.

To believe in everything that’s said to be scientific, one must have faith in media integrity. Irresponsibly, at the genesis of the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Fauci announced on air that “perhaps there will be a certain number of cases of individuals who [contract AIDS that] are just living with and in close contact with someone with AIDS, or at risk of AIDS, who does not necessarily have to have intimate sexual contact or share a needle, but just the ordinary close contact that one sees in normal interpersonal relations.” This single speculation inspired hundreds of theories and hoaxes about contracting the virus via everything from soda cans to toilet seats. As a result, many died in hospital beds while nurses were afraid to touch them. Yet, the informed knew that the virus wasn’t airborne. It was just the religion of science that swallowed the pill whole and conscripted this media propelled fear mongering into their belief system.

To believe in all that’s presented as science, one must have faith that the experiments were well conducted. For instance, the DSM III Removed homosexuality from its inventory of assessable disorders in 1980, this was largely due to the shoddily designed research of Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey declared that “ homosexuality [is] more common than previously assumed, thus suggesting that such behaviors [are] part of a continuum of sexual behaviors and orientations,” despite his sample being, intentionally or unintentionally, skewed. His methodology of arriving at a conclusion, popularism, as we can see from the above statement, is transparently flawed. But, it’s not just that his declaration is flawed, his research was most poorly conducted. Kinsey’s sample was limited to only 5000 males. Of those surveyed, a disproportionate number came from prison inmates, many of whom were sex offenders, he only interviewed one African American but his data wasn’t tabulated and he over-sampled people recruited via homosexual-friendly organizations or magazines. Like anyone else, homosexuals deserve all of the freedoms granted in The Bill of Right and this is something, when and if push comes to shove, I would fight until my very last breathe for, but, being deserving of rights makes them no less of a mentally ill fragment of society who’s 12% more prone to suicide than heterosexuals, significantly more likely than heterosexuals to abuse substances and have suffered childhood abuse. Yet, the religion of science insists that homosexuality is a healthy lifestyle. Social Media and the news never disclosed that Kinsey’s study was a sham and pushes the political agenda behind Kinsey’s message. The younger generation, being that they were raised on TV and social media, knows no better. They are our future leaders and those who will continue to perpetuate the religion of science.

Moreover, to become a believer in the religion of science, one must have faith that the answers provided aren’t merely the correlative events that human’s fallible perception can sense. Most who took Statistics in college are aware that there’s more car accidents when bikinis are on sale, but these two events aren’t related. In 1998, British physician Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet, this study proposed a link between MMR vaccines and increasing rates of autism diagnoses in British children. We now know that there’s no relationship between these events. Despite a correlation, the experiment has been proven to be flawed. There wasn’t a causality. Adherents of the religion of science took to this notion and it became, and for some still is, part of their belief system.

Most of the above issues can be ruled out by peer review, but as with the recent covid vaccines not even peer review uncovered some of the dangers with the vaccine and accurate dissemination of information is a must.

I know what you’re thinking, science is rooted in fact and requires no faith, people don’t believe in science, science, because of the ways in which it investigates measurable occurrences is just correct. I agree, mostly. Yet, there is a religion of science. Adherents of the religion believe anything that fits into the zeitgeist or aligns with their own worldview. For example, The Bell Curve reports this on racial differences in IQ score, Blacks score lower, on average, than Whites. Adherents of the religion of science don’t like this fact and those who tout this may be subject, especially in certain European Countries, to fines and prison terms. I’m not disputing the uselessness of IQ scores, I myself find them of little use and see that there are flaws, although I disagree that the flaw is in the wording of questions (Ebonics and Texan aren’t uniquely codified dialects mutually unintelligible from their mother language, besides, all Americans were educated in the same system and should be able to code switch between ethnic slang and standardized English, as an example, I’m not British but possess the critical thinking skills to infer meaning from unknown British vernacular, but then again, inference in post Enlightenment systems of thinking is considered slanderous assumption). I believe in the science when the science is void of politics.

What caused there to be a religion of science? This phenomenon was caused by the gullibility of man, lack of time to research everything that is presented as science, the how political parties are to use “science” to push their narrative and flaws in methods of research. To be clear, the scientific method is the best we’ve got. Moreover, science isn’t something that requires faith, when done correctly and unadulterated by politics. But, the combination of the above causes there to be a pseudo religion, and even at times religions that exist under the banner of science, of science, like Scientology, blurring the lines between science, science-fiction and pop psychology. Despite my tirade against Gen Z, I don’t honestly expect everyone to sift through scientific articles to find the truth.

The real problem is that the religion of science stifles inconvenient data, data that might be used to find better answers to current questions. Best put in words by Kurt Vonnegut, “new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become Breakfast of Champions.” As a society, we must be granted, through the education system, media disseminating information with integrity and freedom of speech, the intellect and ability to question all things supposed by the socio-political machine that backs the religion of science, only through this means can we progress. Yet, we are living in an era of retrograde. Empiricism and systems of Enlightenment era thinking have gone out the window for feeling and truthiness (as coined by Stephen Colbert). America is Rome in the final days and the religion of science will be her downfall.

The fact is this, honesty in Big Tech ran media has gone the way of the dodo, Gen Z is gullible, the educational system has let them down, time constraint makes it so that most people can’t read every scholarly article, media readily mixes pop psychology, untested hypothesis along with anything that fits the contemporary narrative, even to the point of changing definitions, and packages it, whether that’s by putting it into law or just causing panic if said new scientific fact isn’t obeyed, and calls it all science. Facts are suppressed by the media for easily digested narratives or those who align with the current cultural zeitgeist.

How are us mere mortals supposed to sift through the sea of information and sniff out that which is accurate and hasn’t been filtered through the cultural-political machine? Besides, we live in an era in which a healthy dose of skepticism might brand one as an outcast and render them unable to work. If one questions the popular narrative they might be branded a Right Wing Conservative. We’ve heard it all before: “mask up, take the jab, join the new religion of science, no question, please.” Those who had questions like “what about herd immunity” or “why do definitions keep changing for immunity” were outcast. Often, it pays to fiend Gen Z gullibility.

But I have a few questions. Was it vaccines that put an end to previous pandemics or was it changing attitudes towards bathing, the fact that most people lived in rural communities and herd immunity that ended past epidemics? There are some observations that make these hypotheses worth looking into. During the Bubonic Plague, for example, it was observed that mortality was significantly lower in the Jewish Ghettos than in Christian populations. The “causes of this more favorable situation, which is very well documented from the end of the eighteenth century, are certainly many, ranging from compliance with hygiene standards prescribed by religion, rooted in moderate customs for eating and drinking, the low incidence of venereal diseases, and an economic level on average higher than average. I’m not suggesting that I know that hygiene is the cure for a viral pandemic. In fact, another author noted that “nor should it be forgotten that, if the environment in which Jews lived in the era of the ghettos was particularly unhealthy, the trades they exercised were among those with lower risks of morbidity and professional mortality, and that their living arrangements, pursuant to religious requirements, were particularly favorable for increased resistance against causes of lethality. Was it a complex combination of standards of hygiene in a filthy ghetto that caused Jews, during the Bubonic Plague, to be less susceptible to death, I don’t know. But, asking questions like these go against the new religion of science. One must blind themself to complexity and nuance: “shut up, masks and jabs work, if you have any doubts you’re just as naïve as those who believed vaccines caused Autism.”

The religion of science, because our youth was raised on all things instant and extreme, is filled with extremely binary false dichotomies. How many times have you heard “get the jab or everyone dies” or “wear a mask or everyone dies?” Sadly, it’s not only the foolish who fall for these, these false dichotomies, the kind that never account for any sort of nuance, are disseminated through media and, more often then not, align with the ruling party. The past 2 generations, Millennials and Gen Z, have been primed to accept extremes without question, this is the era in which racism allows for a Black president after all. Unscientific false dichotomies, like the above, readily intermingle with hard science and become part of what culture perceives as scientifically accurate.

Moreover, the religion of science demonstrates cult like behaviors. Those who lack reasoning skills often become, loudly and sometimes violently, the adherents of the religion of science. I for one have enough skepticism in my blood to question all things flown under the banner of science. I vow to listen to others with an open heart and judge their words based on the information I have and in the case that I don’t have any information on said topic, I will look for case studies because new knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth I have to work with, the richer I become.

The believers of the religion of science take these things to be scientific facts:

1) Concepts, although incorrect, that are easily digested and perfectly fit in with the current zeitgeist as touted by the media as scientific facts. As an example, many shouted wearing a mask is harmless although it was obvious to others that continual mask wearing is dangerous and recent study states that a “significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven. Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2 masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”

2) Artefacts from popular psychology, those wivestales about mental health that sound correct but aren’t.

3) Concepts from psychology and the social sciences that are either only understood by the masses in part, taken out of context or never were correct but because the fact that they fit into the era’s zeitgeist they were adapted by the masses. For example, the alpha/beta man paradigm, which was discredited by the duo who first discovered it or that Dr. Money indisputably proved that gender is a spectrum.

3) A general misunderstanding of science. For example a belief in miraculous things like superfoods and that said superfoods are scientifically tested. This goes hand in hand with things like natural medicine (the greater the dilute the greater the efficacy), the healing powers of meditation (aside from a placebo effect) or any other sophistry that may have been shown somewhat effective in studies because they have the potential of improving outlook by increasing hope.

4) A belief that studies with few participants have the end answer. We saw this with things like priming and the covid vaccine efficacy.

5) Confusing and mixing philosophy with science. For example, although Pascal’s Wager may be completely rational to some, it isn’t science.

At times, science has been a cultural phenomenon that aligns itself with the current zeitgeist and those in power. This is just one of those times. It’s not a monarch these days who decides what’s accurate, it’s Big Tech, Big Pharma and Twitter’s Social Justice Warriors. Sadly, inconvenient truths are deemed as misinformation and followers of the religion of science blindly accept, although often against their better judgement, that the verdict passed down by those in power is the best possible answer.

In brief, faith in accurate results, along with accurate dissemination of results, is something hard to come by. In reality, this isn’t an article about science, it’s about media integrity and the naivety of the masses. To illustrate my point by returning to the notion of vaccines and Autism, the media in the UK rushed to publish the notion that vaccines cause Autism despite strong evidence refuting it. Moreover, at the beginning of the Pandemic Dr. Fauci said “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is,” but media preferred to report a panic inducing and loyal religion forging and are defending mask wearing until this very day. Even pro-mask studies, like the one conducted in Bangladesh, prey on the masses’ inability to understand basic math. Ten percent efficacy wouldn’t be an acceptable number for anything else. Yet, the religion of science, sycophants for Big Tech, Big Pharma and those who currently run the country, conscripted these false claims into their belief system falsely claiming “it’s the science!”

Bibliography

Brown, M. (2021). Yes, Childhood Sexual Abuse Often Does Contribute to Homosexuality. The Stream. https://stream.org/yes-childhood-sexual-abuse-often-contribute-homosexuality/

ERLC. (2020, June 11). Alfred Kinsey: A Brief Summary and Critique — ERLC. https://erlc.com/resource-library/articles/alfred-kinsey-a-brief-summary-and-critique/

Foa, A. (2000). The Jews of Europe After the Black Death. Univ of California Press.

Lovering, N. (2022, January 28). Can Vaccines Cause Autism? Psych Central. https://psychcentral.com/autism/do-vaccines-cause-autism#where-did-this-myth-start

Mph, J. D. Q. M., & Larson, H. (2018, February 28). The Vaccine-Autism Myth Started 20 Years Ago. Here’s Why It Still Endures Today. Time. https://time.com/5175704/andrew-wakefield-vaccine-autism/

Researchers Find Disparities in Suicide Risk Among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Adults. (2021, November 9). National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2021/researchers-find-disparities-in-suicide-risk-among-lesbian-gay-and-bisexual-adults

RudeBoyPadilla. (2022, January 24). Fauci, saying kids can get AIDS by just being close to someone with AIDS. Yet people trust this guy! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj-0woKO0c4

Siegel, E. (2017, April 12). The Real Problem with Charles Murray and “The Bell Curve.” Scientific American Blog Network. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/

Staff, R. (2020, October 8). Fact check: Outdated video of Fauci saying “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” U.S. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-fauci-outdated-video-masks-idUSKBN26T2TR

Substance Use and SUDs in LGBTQ* Populations | National Institute on Drug Abuse. (2023, February 24). National Institute on Drug Abuse. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/substance-use-suds-in-lgbtq-populations

[linapoletti]

In its activism and agitation, ACT UP was often fighting against inherent biological limits as much as governmental policies. No amount of rage and public awareness could by themselves cure a disease. To this day, despite decades of well-funded research, there is still no vaccine for HIV-AIDS. The drugs have gotten more sophisticated, but in principle, the treatment remains the same as it was with AZT: AIDS is still treated as a chronic condition to be managed with antiretrovirals.

With the appearance of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, or PrEP, in 2012, it became common to prescribe antiretrovirals not just for AIDS patients, but also as a daily preventive measure for healthy sexually active gay men. This trend of medicalizing the healthy hasn’t been unique to homosexuals, of course. As the physician and critic of medicine Seamus O’Mahony has written, “Pharma’s single greatest idea was to move its focus from the sick to the well, thus creating vast new markets of ‘patients’ requiring lifetime treatment with drugs.” For example, healthy people can be redefined as being at risk of future disease based on measures like blood pressure or cholesterol and then prescribed medication they must take for the rest of their lives to keep the risk at bay.

The increased medicalization of everyday life in recent decades hasn’t been a purely top-down process. However unwittingly, AIDS activists played a part in bringing it about. ACT UP provided a model for patients organizing themselves into a political constituency to raise awareness and demand drugs for their condition. Pharma is an enormously powerful industry, but by funding patient-support groups, it can present itself as the voice of the powerless.

During the Covid pandemic, many activists demanded that medicine and public health be accorded massive power over our daily lives. Notable among them was Yale epidemiologist and public intellectual Gregg Gonsalves, a veteran of ACT UP. As a young man, Gonsalves spoke of the need for activists to prod science in the right direction on AIDS research. More recently, he became a vociferous advocate of mask and vaccine mandates to fight Covid.

But nowhere is ACT UP’s legacy more apparent than in the relationship between contemporary transgender activism and transgender medicine. In this politically charged domain, the division between science and activism has broken down almost completely. Activists have managed to get the medical establishment to adopt the so-called affirmative model for gender dysphoria. According to this model, if patients experience distress about their secondary sex characteristics, the role of medical professionals is to affirm them as having a transgender identity and put them on path to hormones and surgeries.

In their rhetoric and style, trans activists bear a close resemblance to ACT UP. Both groups have argued that withholding access to experimental drugs amounts to deliberate murder, and the ubiquitous talk of “trans genocide” echoes ACT UP’s rhetoric from decades ago. Trans activists, like AIDS activists in their day, see themselves as a radically oppositional force, but their demands happen to coincide with the interests of a pharmaceutical industry always seeking out new groups of lifelong customers and novel rationales for loosening regulatory oversight.

In one crucial respect, trans activism goes well beyond ACT UP’s work. While Kramer and others exaggerated the dangers of AIDS to the population at large, it was certainly true that many people were dying or desperately sick of the disease in the group’s heyday. By contrast, trans activists’ claims about looming death are almost entirely a rhetorical tactic. We see this, for example, in the routine claim that dysphoric youth will all kill themselves if they aren’t allowed to transition. As a statistic, this is a fabrication, but suicidal ideation is contagious; by endlessly repeating it, activists make it more likely to be true. The assertion is better understood as a threat than a statement of fact.

[nathan84593]

American pharma magazine

A publication released by Ochre Media Pvt. Ltd. every Semiannual. It serves as the main information source for important executives at the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, both in print and digital media. Pharma Focus America looks at major issues and developments affecting the future of the pharmaceutical sector in America and the rest of the world.

[fantabulisticity]

Posted July 19, 2022

By Christopher Lane, Ph.D; reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

Key points

Surveys indicate that 85-90 percent of the public believes low serotonin or a chemical imbalance causes depression.

Among 237 psychology students interviewed, 46 percent had heard the chemical imbalance explanation from a physician.

The serotonin hypothesis has been challenged repeatedly and found wanting, even as it remains popular and influential.

A comprehensive, well-powered, high-quality umbrella review now determines that the theory is “not empirically substantiated.”

Almost as soon as it was floated in 1965 by Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Schildkraut, the serotonin hypothesis of depression—reduced and simplified by pharma marketing to the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression and anxiety—has been subject to critical research and found wanting.

The poor standing of the hypothesis in the scientific literature, however, barely dented its afterlife in textbooks, across clinical and treatment settings, and on mental health apps and websites. Nor has it dispelled the continued use of the phrase as “shorthand” between doctors and patients and in everyday settings, including for quite different mental states and conditions.

The “Chemical Imbalance” Metaphor Takes Root

Revisiting the history of this controversy raises several still-relevant details. In December 2005, as advertising for SSRI antidepressants flooded American magazines, talk shows, and network TV, the result of multibillion-dollar campaigns pitched in this case directly to consumers, Florida-based professors and researchers Jeffrey Lacasse and Jonathan Leo asked pointedly in PLoS Medicine, “Are the claims made in SSRI advertising congruent with the scientific evidence?”

The answer in “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect Between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature,” their well-researched article, was a resounding no. The resulting “incongruence,” they determined, was “remarkable and possibly unparalleled.”

Lacasse and Leo found repeated evidence that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved the marketing of SSRIs with two phrases still heavily in the subjunctive—that depression “may be due to a serotonin deficiency” and that SSRI efficacy, “modestly” outcompeting placebo, was “presumed to be linked to potentiation of serotonergic activity.” However, the research itself could not identify the precise mechanism.

The FDA had accepted aspirational language that the drugs “help to restore the brain’s chemical balance” and “bring serotonin levels closer to normal,” even though both claims were, and remain, scientifically meaningless.

“There is no such thing as a scientifically established correct ‘balance’ of serotonin,” Lacasse and Leo cautioned more than a decade ago, joining numerous other experts then and now. Additionally, both aspirational claims rest on a hypothesis that follow-up studies would end up contradicting repeatedly. In short, both the hypothesis and the expensive marketing that pushed it into American living rooms rested on a hedge: “Scientists believe that it could be linked with an imbalance of a chemical in the brain called serotonin.”

A Multibillion-Dollar Error

The hedge proved highly effective, even though, as David Healy explained in 2015 in “Serotonin and Depression,” in the BMJ, in practice, it entailed embracing or tacitly accepting “the marketing of a myth.” Through further oversimplification, a revised metaphor of a “chemical imbalance” took root as folk wisdom for multiple, dissimilar conditions listed in the DSM.

Returning to the controversy in “Antidepressants and the Chemical Imbalance Theory of Depression” (2015), Lacasse and Leo found that while the marketing had shifted emphasis from “correcting imbalances” to “‘adjusting’ or ‘affecting’ neurotransmitter levels,” leading psychiatrists were if anything, more wedded to the “chemical imbalance” metaphor than before.

Some had taken to the airwaves to say that it simplified communication with their patients. Daniel Carlat, the editor of The Carlat Psychiatry Report, explained on National Public Radio when asked what we know about psychiatric medication:

We don’t know how the medications actually work in the brain…. I’ll often say something like the way Zoloft works, is, it increases the level of serotonin in your brain (or synapses, neurons) and, presumably, the reason you’re depressed or anxious is that you have some sort of a deficiency. And I say that [chuckles] not because I really believe it, because I know the evidence really isn’t there for us to understand the mechanism—I think I say that because patients want to know something. And they want to know that we as physicians have some basic understanding of what we’re doing when we’re prescribing medications. They certainly don’t want to know that a psychiatrist essentially has no idea how these medications work (Qtd. in Lacasse and Leo).

The point in reproducing Carlat (who has made several such admissions on national media) was not to single him out but to stress how widespread the thinking and practice he shared so candidly. In 2007, as Lacasse and Leo pointed out, Frances, Lysaker, and Robinson found that among 237 psychology students interviewed, “46 percent had heard the chemical imbalance explanation from a physician.”

Inevitably, the problem of spreading false scientific information dovetails with that of medical ethics and the risk of enabling medically-induced harms. Because physicians swear to uphold the Hippocratic oath Primum non nocere (“First Do No Harm”), Lacasse and Leo questioned “the ethics of telling a falsehood to patients because you think it is good for them.”

They asked more broadly of those repeating the discredited hypothesis, whether as metaphor or oversimplification: “Do you believe it is ethical to present a falsified scientific theory as a fact to a patient? What are the possible negative effects of doing so?”

A significant consequence they anticipated at the time was that patients would realistically “conclude that they have been misled.”

Cut to the Present-day

A major new review of the research—the first of its kind exhaustively reviewing the evidence, published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry—reaches a strikingly similar conclusion. In “The Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Systematic Umbrella Review of the Evidence,” University College London Psychiatry Professor Joanna Moncrieff and a team of five other top European researchers found “there is no evidence of a connection between reduced serotonin levels or activity and depression.”

The peer-reviewed umbrella review—representing one of the highest forms of evidence in scientific research—was extrapolated from meta-analyses and systematic reviews on depression and serotonin levels, receptors, and transporters involving tens of thousands of participants.

Although “the serotonin hypothesis of depression is still influential,” Moncrieff and coauthors noted, citing widely adopted textbooks published as recently as 2020 and surveys indicating that “85-90 percent of the public believes that depression is caused by low serotonin or a chemical imbalance,” the primary research indicates there is “no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations.”

Among other key findings:

“Research on serotonin receptors and the serotonin transporter, the protein targeted by most antidepressants, found weak and inconclusive evidence suggestive of higher levels of serotonin activity in people with depression.” Widespread use of antidepressants is seen as the likely cause.

The researchers also looked at studies where serotonin levels had been “artificially lowered in hundreds of people” (by depriving their diets of the necessary amino acid that makes serotonin) and found that “lowering serotonin in this way did not produce depression in hundreds of healthy volunteers,” according to a 2007 meta-analysis and several recent studies.

Numerous other reviews on re-examination were found to provide weak, inconsistent, or nonexistent evidence of a connection between serotonin and depression.

The researchers also probed well-powered studies involving tens of thousands of patients that focused on gene variation, including the gene for the serotonin transporter. These found “no difference in the genes between people with depression and healthy controls.” As such, “high-quality genetic studies effectively exclude an association between genotypes related to the serotonin system and depression, including a proposed interaction with stress.”

The researchers also looked at “the effects of stressful life events and found that these exerted a strong effect on people’s risk of becoming depressed—the more of these a person had experienced, the more likely they were to be depressed.”

Legacy Effects of a Discredited Theory

“The popularity of the chemical imbalance idea of depression has coincided with a huge increase in the use of antidepressants,” note Moncrieff and coauthor Mark A. Horowitz in the study’s press release. “Prescriptions for antidepressants have sky-rocketed since the 1990s, going from being rare to a situation now where one in six adults in England and 2 percent of teenagers are prescribed an antidepressant in a given year.”

The practical ramifications of the umbrella review are thus vast and consequential, involving millions of people across multiple countries because the findings are tied to a discredited theory that is still fueling mass prescribing on a global basis.

Moncrieff explained in the press release:

Patients should not be told that depression is caused by low serotonin or by a chemical imbalance and they should not be led to believe that antidepressants work by targeting these hypothetical and unproven abnormalities. In particular, the idea that antidepressants work in the same way as insulin for diabetes is completely misleading. We do not understand what antidepressants are doing to the brain exactly, and giving people this sort of misinformation prevents them from making an informed decision about whether to take antidepressants or not.

Invited to extrapolate the review’s findings for Psychology Today, Moncrieff added:

Antidepressant use has reached epidemic proportions across the world and is still rising, especially among young people. Many people who take them suffer side effects and withdrawal problems that can be really severe and debilitating. A major driver of this situation is the false belief that depression is due to a chemical imbalance. It is high time to inform the public that this belief is not grounded in science.

End of article.

Also:

Joanna Moncrieff et al. Mol Psychiatry. 2022.

Abstract

The serotonin hypothesis of depression is still influential. We aimed to synthesise and evaluate evidence on whether depression is associated with lowered serotonin concentration or activity in a systematic umbrella review of the principal relevant areas of research. PubMed, EMBASE and PsycINFO were searched using terms appropriate to each area of research, from their inception until December 2020. Systematic reviews, meta-analyses and large data-set analyses in the following areas were identified: serotonin and serotonin metabolite, 5-HIAA, concentrations in body fluids; serotonin 5-HT1A receptor binding; serotonin transporter (SERT) levels measured by imaging or at post-mortem; tryptophan depletion studies; SERT gene associations and SERT gene-environment interactions. Studies of depression associated with physical conditions and specific subtypes of depression (e.g. bipolar depression) were excluded. Two independent reviewers extracted the data and assessed the quality of included studies using the AMSTAR-2, an adapted AMSTAR-2, or the STREGA for a large genetic study. The certainty of study results was assessed using a modified version of the GRADE. We did not synthesise results of individual meta-analyses because they included overlapping studies. The review was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42020207203). 17 studies were included: 12 systematic reviews and meta-analyses, 1 collaborative meta-analysis, 1 meta-analysis of large cohort studies, 1 systematic review and narrative synthesis, 1 genetic association study and 1 umbrella review. Quality of reviews was variable with some genetic studies of high quality. Two meta-analyses of overlapping studies examining the serotonin metabolite, 5-HIAA, showed no association with depression (largest n = 1002). One meta-analysis of cohort studies of plasma serotonin showed no relationship with depression, and evidence that lowered serotonin concentration was associated with antidepressant use (n = 1869). Two meta-analyses of overlapping studies examining the 5-HT1A receptor (largest n = 561), and three meta-analyses of overlapping studies examining SERT binding (largest n = 1845) showed weak and inconsistent evidence of reduced binding in some areas, which would be consistent with increased synaptic availability of serotonin in people with depression, if this was the original, causal abnormaly. However, effects of prior antidepressant use were not reliably excluded. One meta-analysis of tryptophan depletion studies found no effect in most healthy volunteers (n = 566), but weak evidence of an effect in those with a family history of depression (n = 75). Another systematic review (n = 342) and a sample of ten subsequent studies (n = 407) found no effect in volunteers. No systematic review of tryptophan depletion studies has been performed since 2007. The two largest and highest quality studies of the SERT gene, one genetic association study (n = 115,257) and one collaborative meta-analysis (n = 43,165), revealed no evidence of an association with depression, or of an interaction between genotype, stress and depression. The main areas of serotonin research provide no consistent evidence of there being an association between serotonin and depression, and no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations. Some evidence was consistent with the possibility that long-term antidepressant use reduces serotonin concentration.

[slowlyteenagestarlight]

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

The 'Reality Manufacturing Company' not only turns out the past, present, and future for mass consumption.

It explains why things are the way they are. It appoints itself the master of attributing causes, the king of cause and effect."

(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

Devotees of science often assume that what is called science is real and true. It must be. Otherwise, their faith is broken. Their superficial understanding is shattered. Their "superior view" of the world is torpedoed.

Such people choose unofficial "anti-science" targets to attack. They never think of inspecting their own house for enormous fraud.

For example: psychiatry.

An open secret has been slowly bleeding out into public consciousness for the past ten years.

THERE ARE NO DEFINITIVE LABORATORY TESTS FOR ANY SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDER.

And along with that:

ALL SO-CALLED MENTAL DISORDERS ARE CONCOCTED, NAMED, LABELED, DESCRIBED, AND CATEGORIZED by a committee of psychiatrists, from menus of human behaviors.

Their findings are published in periodically updated editions of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), printed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

For years, even psychiatrists have been blowing the whistle on this hazy crazy process of "research."

Of course, pharmaceutical companies, who manufacture highly toxic drugs to treat every one of these "disorders," are leading the charge to invent more and more mental-health categories, so they can sell more drugs and make more money.

But we have a mind-boggling twist. Under the radar, one of the great psychiatric stars, who has been out in front in inventing mental disorders, went public. He blew the whistle on himself and his colleagues. And for several years, almost no one noticed.

His name is Dr. Allen Frances, and he made VERY interesting statements to Gary Greenberg, author of a Wired article: "Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness." (Dec.27, 2010).

Major media never picked up on the interview in any serious way. It never became a scandal.

Dr. Allen Frances is the man who, in 1994, headed up the project to write the latest edition of the psychiatric bible, the DSM-IV. This tome defines and labels and describes every official mental disorder. The DSM-IV eventually listed 297 of them.

In an April 19, 1994, New York Times piece, "Scientist At Work," Daniel Goleman called Frances,

"Perhaps the most powerful psychiatrist in America at the moment…"

Well, sure...

If you're sculpting the entire canon of diagnosable mental disorders for your colleagues, for insurers, for the government, for Pharma (who will sell the drugs matched up to the 297 DSM-IV diagnoses), you're right up there in the pantheon.

Long after the DSM-IV had been put into print, Dr. Frances talked to Wired's Greenberg and said the following:

"There is no definition of a mental disorder. It's bullshit. I mean, you just can't define it."

BANG...

That's on the order of the designer of the Hindenburg, looking at the burned rubble on the ground, remarking,

"Well, I knew there would be a problem."

After a suitable pause, Dr. Frances remarked to Greenberg,

"These concepts [of distinct mental disorders] are virtually impossible to define precisely with bright lines at the borders."

Frances should have mentioned the fact that his baby, the DSM-IV, had unscientifically rearranged earlier definitions of ADHD and Bipolar to permit many MORE diagnoses, leading to a vast acceleration of drug-dosing with highly powerful and toxic compounds.

Finally, at the end of the Wired interview, Frances flew off into a bizarre fantasy:

"Diagnosis [as spelled out in the DSM-IV] is part of the magic… you know those medieval maps? In the places where they didn't know what was going on, they wrote 'Dragons live here'… we have a dragon's world here. But you wouldn't want to be without the map."

Translation:

Patients need hope for the healing of their troubles; so even if we psychiatrists are shooting blanks and pretending to know one kind of mental disorder from another, even if we're inventing these mental-disorder definitions based on no biological or chemical diagnostic tests - it's a good thing, because patients will then believe and have hope; they'll have hope because psychiatrists place a label on their problems…

Needless to say, this has nothing to do with science.

Here is a smoking-gun statement made by another prominent mental-health expert, on an episode of PBS' Frontline series.

The episode was: "Does ADHD Exist?"

PBS FRONTLINE INTERVIEWER: Skeptics say that there's no biological marker - that it [ADHD] is the one condition out there where there is no blood test, and that no one knows what causes it.

BARKLEY (Dr. Russell Barkley, clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston): That's tremendously naïve, and it shows a great deal of illiteracy about science and about the mental health professions. A disorder doesn't have to have a blood test to be valid. If that were the case, all mental disorders would be invalid… There is no lab test for any mental disorder right now in our science. That doesn't make them invalid.

Without intending to, Dr. Russell Barkley blows an ear-shattering whistle on his own profession.

So let's take Dr. Barkley to school. Medical science, and disease-research in particular, rests on the notion that you can make a diagnosis backed up by lab tests. If you can't produce lab tests, you're spinning fantasies.

These fantasies might be hopeful, they might be "educated guesses," they might be launched from traditional centers of learning, they might be backed up by billions of dollars of grant money… but they're still fantasies.

Dr. Barkley is essentially saying,

"There is no lab test for any mental disorder. If a test were the standard of proof, we wouldn't have science at all, and that would mean our whole profession rests on nothing - and that is unthinkable, so therefore a test doesn't matter."

That logic is no logic at all. That science is no science at all.

Barkley is proving the case against himself. He just doesn't want to admit it. Psychiatry is all fraud all the time.

Without much of a stretch, you could say psychiatry has been the most widespread profiling operation in the history of the human race. Its goal has been to bring humans everywhere into its system. It hardly matters which label a person is painted with, as long as it adds up to a diagnosis and a prescription of drugs.

300 so-called mental disorders caused by… what? No lab evidence. No diagnostic tests. No blood tests, saliva tests, brain scans, genetic assays. No nothing.

But psychiatrists continue to assert they are the masters of causation. They know what's behind "mental disorders." They're in charge.

What about the generalized "chemical imbalance" hypothesis stating that all mental disorders stem from such imbalances in the brain?

Dr. Ronald Pies, the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, laid that hypothesis to rest in the July 11, 2011, issue of the Times ("Psychiatry's New Brain-Mind and the Legend of the 'Chemical Imbalance'") with this staggering admission:

"In truth, the 'chemical imbalance' notion was always a kind of urban legend - never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists."

Boom.

Dead...

The point is, for decades the whole basis of psychiatric drug research, drug prescription, and drug sales has been:

"we're correcting a chemical imbalance in the brain."

The problem was, researchers had never established a normal baseline for chemical balance.

So they were shooting in the dark. Worse, they were faking a theory. Pretending they knew something when they didn't.

In his 2011 piece in Psychiatric Times, Dr. Pies tries to protect his colleagues in the psychiatric profession with this fatuous remark:

"In the past 30 years, I don't believe I have ever heard a knowledgeable, well-trained psychiatrist make such a preposterous claim [about chemical imbalance in the brain], except perhaps to mock it… the 'chemical imbalance' image has been vigorously promoted by some pharmaceutical companies, often to the detriment of our patients' understanding."

Absurd.

First of all, many psychiatrists have explained and do explain to their patients that the drugs are there to correct a chemical imbalance.

And second, if all well-trained psychiatrists have known, all along, that the chemical-imbalance theory is a fraud…

…then why on earth have they been prescribing tons of drugs to their patients…

…since those drugs are developed on the false premise that they correct an imbalance?

The honchos of psychiatry are seeing the handwriting on the wall. Their game has been exposed.

The chemical imbalance theory is a fake. There are no defining physical tests for any of the 300 so-called mental disorders. All diagnoses are based on arbitrary clusters or menus of human behavior. The drugs are harmful, dangerous, toxic. Some of them induce violence, suicide, homicide. Some of the drugs cause brain damage.

So the shrinks have to move into another model of "mental illness," another con, another fraud. And they're looking for one. For example, genes plus "psycho-social factors" cause mental disorders.

A mish-mash of more unproven science.

"New breakthrough research on the functioning of the brain is paying dividends and holds great promise…" Professional PR and gibberish.

Meanwhile, the business model demands drugs for sale.

So even though the chemical-imbalance nonsense has been discredited, it will continue on as a dead man walking, a zombie.

***

Two questions always pop up when I write a critique of psychiatry:

- The first one is: psychiatric researchers are doing a massive amount of work studying brain function. They do have tests. Yes, experimental tests.

But NONE of those tests are contained in the DSM, the psychiatric bible, as the basis of the definition of ANY mental disorder. If the tests were conclusive, they would be heralded in the DSM. They aren't.

- The second question is: if all these mental disorders are fiction, why are so many people saddled with problems? Why are some people off the rails? Why are they crazy?

The list of potential answers is very long. A real practitioner would focus on one patient at a time and try to discover what has affected him to such a marked degree.

For example:

Severe nutritional deficiency

Toxic dyes and colors in processed food

Ingestion of pesticides and herbicides

Profound sensitivities to certain foods

The ingestion of toxic pharmaceuticals

Life-altering damage as a result of vaccines

Exposure to environmental chemicals

Heavy physical and emotional abuse in the home or at school

Battlefield stress and trauma (also present in certain neighborhoods)

Prior head injury

Chronic infection

Alcohol and street drugs

Debilitating poverty.

Other items could be added.

Psychiatry is:

fake

fraud

pseudoscience from top to bottom...

It's complete fiction dressed up as fact.

But the obsessed devotees of science tend to back away from this. They close their eyes.

If a "branch of knowledge" as extensive as psychiatry is nothing more than an organized delusion, what other aspect of science might likewise be parading as truth, when it is actually mere paper blowing in the wind?

[ahiddenpath]

Books Recs

I want to list the books that have meant the most to me in the last few years- the kind of books you grow and/or learn by, at least in my opinion.  The books are modern (1969 at the oldest).

To be clear, I’m not trying to say that these books are all equally...  “Important/notable.”  I admit that it might seem strange to see some of these novels together!  The uniting theme is that they all helped me see the world differently, added more facets to my understanding, and for this I am profoundly grateful.

I can’t do these books justice, so I will be sparse in my descriptions and link out to their wikipedia pages.

More beneath the cut.

Fiction

Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

A beautiful, haunting, crushing story about black slavery in the United States and the psychological, spiritual, and physical damage it causes.  Morrison utilizes nonlinear storytelling to showcase how trauma affects the past, present, and future.  

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Like Beloved, Slaughterhouse-Five uses nonlinear storytelling to showcase trauma, stemming from war instead of slavery.  A friend pursuing a pHD in literature tells me that she would teach these two novels as a unit.

If you’ve had events from the past rush to your face and color your future, these books...  They help make sense of the senseless.  Not the instigating events- no one can make sense of slavery or war- but of the impacts caused by their trauma.  

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin (1969)

“The Left Hand of Darkness was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction and is the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction,” from the wikipedia page linked above. 

Non-fiction

Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed (2012)

This book collects selected questions and responses from Dear Sugar, an advice column Strayed wrote anonymously for an online literary magazine.  The questions range a broad array of topics, a litany of human hearts hurting and reaching for help.  Strayed is unbelievably wise, empathetic, and kind in her responses- but grounded and firm, always informing her correspondents when they should step up and take action.  This book can teach you more about life and encourage you to grow than...  Well, than most things can aspire to, in my opinion.

Burnout (2019) and Come as You Are (2015), Emily and Amelia Nagosaki

Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker (2017)

This one is of particular interest to me, as it makes people angry.  I’ve unwittingly deeply upset people by talking about it!  Walker maintains that sleep is the number one aspect of physical health, and that folks routinely subsisting on less than eight hours per night are essentially... wrecking their memory, inhibiting their immune systems, hindering their ability to learn new information, functioning like drunk drivers in some cases, shrinking their testicles if applicable, and more!  Folks in capitalistic societies rarely get eight hours of sleep per night, and instead of seeing our forced lifestyles as the problem, folks...  GET ANGRY, my dudes, like you’re saying it’s their fault that they’re damaging themselves!  Whatever you think of the book, the response to it is its own little experiment.

On Writing, Stephen King (2000)

The part I want to highlight is his explanation on how to proofread/remove words that aren’t needed.  This man taught me more about writing- like, a concrete, practical lesson I immediately grasped and began to utilize- in a few pages than the dozens of writing books I’ve read combined.  

Biography

Wild, Cheryl Strayed (2012)

Mean, Myriam Gurba (2017) Bad Indians: A tribal Memoir, Deborah Miranda (2013) Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir, Sarah Fawn Montgomery (2018)

[interludepress]

Open for Pre-Order: Claire Rudy Foster's SHINE OF THE EVER on Audiobook

Celebrating an Acclaimed Mixtape of Short Stories with an Audiobook Read by Author Claire Rudy Foster

A literary mixtape of life, love, and queer community.

By turns tender and punk-tough, Shine of the Ever is a series of short stories of queer voices out of 1990s Portland. This collection of interconnected stories explores what binds a community of queer and trans people as they negotiate love, screwing up, and learning to forgive themselves for being young and sometimes foolish. Narrated by author Claire Rudy Foster. "...the Best LGBTQ Books That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2019" — O Magazine

SHINE OF THE EVER

Release Date: November 16, 2021

MSRP: $17.99 US

Running Times: 6 hours, 43 minutes

ISBN: 978-1-951954-18-5

Written and Narrated by Claire Rudy Foster

Cover art by C.B. Messer

Pre-Sale Bundles and Deals:

Pre-order the audiobook of SHINE OF THE EVER from the IP Web Store, and get 30% off the print or ebook edition with code MIXTAPE.

Available from the IP Web Store, Audible, Apple, Audiobooks.com, B&N, Google Play, Kobo, Libro.FM and more!

Submit proof of purchase to contact@interludepress.com by Nov. 16 for your chance to win a print copy signed by the author and an Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker!

About the Author

Claire Rudy Foster is a queer, nonbinary trans person in long term recovery. Foster's short story collection Shine of the Ever (Interlude Press, 2019) was named by O Magazine as one of the best LGBTQ books of the year and was also included on the ALA Over the Rainbow long list. They also co-wrote Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis and American Fix: Inside the Opioid Addiction Crisis - and How to End It (All Points, 2018) with Ryan Hampton. Their other writing can also be found on NPR and in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Allure, among others. They live in Portland, Oregon.

Add SHINE OF THE EVER to your Goodreads TBR here.

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

Big Pharma Conspiracy

The Big Pharma conspiracy theory is a group of conspiracy theories that claim that the medical community in general and pharmaceutical companies in particular, especially large corporations, operate for sinister purposes and against the public good, and that they allegedly conceal effective treatments, or even cause and worsen a wide range of diseases. Specific variations of the conspiracy theory have included the claim that natural alternative remedies to health problems are being suppressed, the claim that drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS are ineffective and harmful, and the claim that a cure for all cancers has been discovered but hidden from the public. 

The conspiracy theory has a variety of different specific manifestations. Each has different narratives, but they always cast "Big Pharma" as the villain of the peace. Alternative treatments In Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About, Kevin Trudeau proposes that there are all-natural cures for serious illnesses including cancer, herpes, arthritis, AIDS, acid reflux disease, various phobias, depression, obesity, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, attention deficit disorder, muscular dystrophy, and that these are all being deliberately hidden and suppressed from the public by the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the major food and drug companies.

HIV/AIDS - In a 2006 column for Harper's Magazine, journalist Celia Farber claimed that the antiretroviral drug nevirapine was part of a conspiracy by the "scientific-medical complex" to spread toxic drugs. Farber said that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that nevirapine had been unethically administered to pregnant women in clinical trials, leading to a fatality  Farber's theories and claims were refuted by scientists, but, according to Seth Kalichman, the resulting publicity represented a breakthrough moment for AIDS denialism.

Hidden cancer cure - The idea that big pharma has a cure for cancer and is suppressing it so that they can maintain a profit is believed by as much as 27% of the American public according to a 2005 survey. The argument is that pharmaceutical companies are slowing down research for a comprehensive cure for cancer by developing high-profit, single-purpose treatments rather than focusing on a supposed cure-all for all cancers

[merelygifted]

Opioid-pushing Sackler family pays to get off the hook and gets to keep billions | Boing Boing

Nearly 500,000 Americans died from opioids between 1999 and 2019 while the Sackler drug-dealing family enriched itself by illegally pushing addictive Oxycontin on patients.

New York Magazine reports that 15 state attorneys general have agreed to settle lawsuits against Purdue Pharma for its illegal sales practices that caused millions of people to become addicted to OxyContin. Purdue's current owners (descendants of the three Sackler brothers who founded Purdue) will pay a $4.5 billion settlement in exchange for being allowed to reorganize the company in bankruptcy court. 

From New York:

The $4.5 billion sum is hefty, but the Sacklers can pay it: The House Committee on Oversight and Reform estimates the family's net assets at around $11 billion. It also appears they will not face criminal charges.

One other thing the Sackler family won't do is apologize for their starring role in a disaster that killed a half million people:

At a press conference announcing the settlement, attorneys general from New York, Massachusetts, and Minnesota noted they were unable to secure a public apology or an admission of culpability. Instead, the family made off with its remaining $6.5 billion or so and gave a boilerplate statement: "This resolution to the mediation is an important step toward providing substantial resources for people and communities in need. The Sackler family hopes these funds will help achieve that goal."