Pediatric Drug Proponents Pushing Pills
by Evelyn Pringle and Martha Rosenberg
Where do parents and teachers get the idea there's "something wrong" with their kid and only an expensive drug can fix it? From Pharma's seamless web of ads, subsidized doctors, journals, medical courses and conferences, paid "patient" groups, phony public services messages and reporters willing to serve as stenographers.
Free stenography for Pharma from sympathetic media includes
articles like "One in 40 Infants Experience Baby Blues, Doctors Say,"
on ABC
News and "Preschool Depression: The Importance of Early Detection of
Depression in Young Children," on Science
Daily.
For many, the face of the drugs-not-hugs message is Harold
Koplewicz M.D. author of the pop best seller It's Nobody's Fault , and former head of NYU's prestigious Child Study
Center. In a 1999 Salon
article, Koplewicz reiterated his "no-fault" statement, assuring
parents that psychiatric illness is not caused by bad parenting. "It is
not that your mother got divorced, or that your father didn't wipe you the
right way," he said. "It really is DNA roulette: You got blue eyes,
blond hair, sometimes a musical ear, but sometimes you get the predisposition
for depression."
Many regard the NYU Child Study Center which Koplewicz founded and led before leaving in 2009 to start his own facility, as helping to usher in the world of brave new pediatric medicine in which children, toddlers and infants, once expected to outgrow their problems, are now diagnosed with lifelong psychiatric problems. The Child Study Center is "a threat to the health and welfare of children," and its doctors are "hustlers working to increase their 'client' population and their commercial value to psychotropic drug manufacturers," charged Vera Sharav, president of the watchdog group, the Alliance for Human Research Protection.
A look at the Center's stated
mission provides no reassurance. Its goal of "eliminating the stigma
of being or having a child with a psychiatric disorder," and
"influencing child-related public policy," sounds a lot like a Pharma
sales plan. And its boast about
having "a structure that allows recruitment of patients for research
studies and then provides 'real-world' testing for successful
controlled-environment findings," could send chills down the back of
parents afraid their kids will be guinea pigs or money-making subjects.
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