Death By Psych Meds

I tend to obsess about my patients.

Especially the ones who have chosen prescription psychiatric drugs over natural alternative substances. I always give a choice when it is possible. it often is.

Of course, I must often rely on research that has been done in other countries. I have gotten used to doing this. I can’t say it bothers me terribly much.

I believe in science.

It is a method of getting to the truth that has advanced. It has actually chipped away at the amount of human knowledge that we are forced to take on faith.

I am surprised that people still ask me (as a family friend did when I was five and said exactly the same thing ) if I can believe in science and believe in God.

I always say I do, because I do. I believe God created the laws of the universe and have never seen an incompatibility between these two allegedly separate belief systems.

Sometime people think I and my opinions (not to mention my clothes) are “weird.” I tell them that all of the scientists I have known and worked with were theists, and worshipped with their families. Every one. There may be atheist scientists but I never knew any.

When people ignore science, they do so at their peril. When they ignore what is known about humans, they risk the lives of those humans.

I obviously have plenty of words. I run out of words to express my rage when I read this.

Haldol and nortriptyline are old drugs. A drug scientist (Paul Janssen) came up with it, legend goes, in a home laboratory in his upstairs apartment in downtown Brussels, about 1957 or so and the first trials in humans were in 1958.

The only good news about nortryptyline is that it has less side effects than most of the drugs in its class, known as “tricyclic antidepressants.”

In the days when tuberculosis was the greatest public health problem in the USA, some media photographer snapped folks dancing for happy in a TB sanitarium. Someone got the idea that these drugs might be good for depression.

My preceptor in psychopharmacology built his career consulting with lawyers in cases where people did not take the appropriate precautions, including at the very least, getting blood levels of the drug and an electrocardiogram (heart tracing). It can delay the conduction of electrical impulses through the heart.

If someone (who wants to kill themselves, as psychiatric patients often do) takes an average of a week’s prescription all at once, they have a 50/50 chance of getting a cardiac arrest and dying dead as a doornail. So with most drugs in this class, and in most situations, I have protected my patients’ lives by never prescribing more than one week’s worth at once.

In many places, I have been on hospital staffs and have personally admitted inpatients to the hospital. In these places, I have gone to hospital staff meetings. I have heard of deaths when different “hospitalists” heard the same laboratory values or the same concerns about a patient and just kept piling them on until the patient died.

I heard a hospital chief of staff say, “the patient is pretty old. We can tell the family he died of natural causes,” or the equivalent, in all such cases I can remember.

The interactions between haldol and nortriptyline are too numerous to list even on this (very reliable) drug site.

The American medical system has been getting out of control since long before I noticed it. The unbridled growth of capitalism lacks regulations to protect human lives.

A revolution requires angry peasants. I cannot stand alone here.

Our government is grossly mismanaging health care, which is more expensive here than anywhere, and of a lower quality than most nations.

Be very afraid. We must start by voicing our opinions and making the USA a participatory democracy as it was originally intended to be.