Well, let’s be fair. Blame also attaches to Stafford’s colleagues at Stanford, and to professors at other American universities, who get paid by drug companies to hawk therapeutically unsubstantiated, physically destructive, and enormously expensive atypical anti-psychotics to prescribers. Now these over-prescribed pills are a national blight.
January 7th, 2011 at 9:11AM
It gets worse even than the Reuters story described. Not only are these problematic drugs being used outside of formal psychotic conditions for depression, autism, personality disorder, and dementia – now they are being trialed for treating anxiety and they are already being used widely off-label for that. Where will the madness end? When they morph into dietary supplements?
Oh, and by the way, these new so-called atypical antipsychotic drugs do cause involuntary movement disorders that can be permanent – they just do it less often than the early antipsychotic drugs do.
UD is right. There has been no shortage of KOLs from our finest medical schools pushing this shit at the behest of Pharma marketing departments. For a consideration, of course.
January 7th, 2011 at 1:34PM
In the United States, there is, in the general population, a deep feeling that newer, more “high tech”, more expensive medicines or medical procedures are necessarily better. This goes way beyond physicians.
I was at a seminar where the speaker discussed robots for performing certain surgeries, including prostate surgery. She mentioned that no study shows that prostate surgery performed by a robot is better for the patient than surgery performed in the ordinary way, but that it is very popular in the United States, and patients demand it. It is more expensive than conventional surgery.
Maybe this is part of the reason for inflated medical expenses.