The shooting this week in
an Oregon school marks the 74th shooting incident in schools in America since
the Sandy Hook murder rampage just 18 months ago in Newtown, Connecticut. When kids are injured or die there is
understandably a much more passionate reaction than to the typical murders in America
The media, politicians and
shrinks all take to the airways whenever there is another incident, and at the
current rate there is one a week. Each
week we get the gun control debate, the profiling and psychological analysis of
the shooter, the grief for the victims, and White House reaction, more promises
and then everyone goes home and does nothing.
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| 74 School locations |
However, in the course of
reacting to the tragedies everyone seems to be caught up in the emotional
frenzy and loses sight of the truth about what is happening. I guess truth has little value when those
raising Hell have no ability to do anything about the continuous stream of
killings.
First the truth.
The worst shootings have
taken place in the states with the toughest gun control laws in America
Since 1993 murders by guns
in America
Many of the weapons being
used are illegal firearms.
More truth.
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| Percent of Youth Aged 4-17
Currently with ADHD Receiving Medication Treatment by State: National Survey of
Children's Health |
Most of the shooters,
where the information was disclosed, had been or were on prescription drugs for
depression, ADHD or other reasons.
All of these prescription
drugs have a direct effect on the brain.
We have no idea what the
long term impact of prescription drugs may be on our children.
When kids have more than 1
problem they may get multiple prescriptions for drugs and the cocktail effect when
mixed has unknown impact on the brain.
Our addiction to drug
prescriptions may very well be causing the increase in school shootings and
killings.
In truth, our medical
system and pharmaceutical greed may be destroying our kids mental and physical
health faster than it destroyed our own health.
Did you ever wonder why no
current reports on prescription drug use, the increase in drug use, and the
deaths from legal drug use are available. The most current analysis is four to five
years old before it is made available.
Are prescriptions,
problems and complications increasing at such a fast rate that critical
information is now being withheld from the public?
If multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical
corporations can report profits the first quarter of the next fiscal year, in
other words within 90 days from when it happened, in order to maintain their
lofty stock values, why can't they tell us how many more children are being
given prescriptions of their drugs, how many died, and what other complications
have been detected from extended use until 4-5 years later?
Politicians must make the
giant pharmaceutical companies liable for all the long term damage they are doing
to our kids minds with their prescriptions, cocktails and indifference. And when kids on prescriptions are doing the
shooting like they have been, then the same companies have to be liable for the
victims deaths, treatment and consequences.
Do you think your elected
representatives will support such a logical liability measure or will they
continue to waive the liability for these companies like they have been doing
all along for the same companies and banks and others?
What is more important to
a politician - innocent school victims or corporate campaign money? So far the money has trumped the kids. So far our ignorance of the effect of drugs
and drug cocktails is shameful. So far
our indifference in demanding change by our politicians is a disgrace but we
can still do something about this before we have destroyed an entire
generation.
Here are some reasons why.
ADHD Medication
This past year, the utilization of medications to treat
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) jumped 9.0%. With this
increase, the United States
now spends more on prescription drugs for Attention Disorders than it does for
all but six other conditions.
Currently, an estimated 5.4 million U.S. children
are diagnosed with ADHD. And with new guidelines from the American Academy of
Pediatrics that now recommend physicians prescribe these medications to
children as young as 4 (previous guidelines suggested a lower limit of age 6),
the number of total diagnosed children is likely to grow.
Interestingly, the local impact of this national trend
depends highly on where you live.
When looking only at Americans with commercial insurance,
Express Scripts researchers found that children living in the South are 63%
more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children living in western states.
When broadening to all American children (including those on Medicaid and other
government-sponsored plans where ADHD prevalence is higher), those living in a
southern state have approximately a 1 in 9 chance of being diagnosed with this
condition.
The American Psychiatric Association states in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that 5% of
children have ADHD.
However, studies in the US
have estimated higher rates in community samples.
Recent surveys asked parents whether their child received an
ADHD diagnosis from a health care provider. The results show that:
Approximately 11% of children 4-17 years of age (6.4
million) have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2011.
The percentage of children with an ADHD diagnosis continues
to increase, from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007 and to 11.0% in 2011.
Rates of ADHD diagnosis increased an average of 3% per year
from 1997 to 2006 and an average of approximately 5% per year
from 2003 to 2011.
Boys (13.2%) were more likely than girls (5.6%) to have ever
been diagnosed with ADHD.
The average age of ADHD diagnosis was 7 years of age, but
children reported by their parents as having more severe ADHD were diagnosed
earlier.
Prevalence of ADHD diagnosis varied substantially by state,
from a low of 5.6% in Nevada to a high of
18.7% in Kentucky .
Medication Treatment
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| Percent youth being treated for ADHD |
Parents were also asked about whether their child was taking
medication for ADHD. The results show that:
The prevalence of children 4-17 years of age taking ADHD
medication increased from 4.8% in 2007 to 6.1% in 2011
More US
children were receiving ADHD treatment in 2011 compared to 2007; however, as
many as 17.5% of children with current ADHD were not receiving either
medication for ADHD or mental health counseling in 2011.
In 2011, geographic variability in the percent of children
taking medication for ADHD ranged from a low of 2% in Nevada
to a high of 10.4% in Louisiana .
Anti-depression Medication
In the US ,
almost 40% of people with mental health issues received treatment in 2012.
But data
from the US department of health also shows the types of treatments
they received - from psychologists to prescription medication (including
antidepressants).
Like other countries, the use of antidepressants in the US has soared.
In 1998, 11.2 million Americans used these drugs. By 2010, it was 23.3 million.
Despite that rise, expenditure on antidepressants has barely risen as the drugs
have become cheaper – from $624 per person in 1998, to $651 in 2010.
According to a report
released yesterday by the National Center for Health Statistics
(NCHS), the rate of antidepressant use in this country among teens and adults
(people ages 12 and older) increased by almost 400% between 1988–1994 and
2005–2008.
The federal government’s health statisticians figure that
about one in every 10 Americans takes an antidepressant. And by their
reckoning, antidepressants were the third most common prescription medication
taken by Americans in 2005–2008, the latest period during which the National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collected data on prescription
drug use.
Here are a few other stand-out statistics from the report on
antidepressants:
23% of women in their 40s and 50s take antidepressants, a higher percentage than any other group (by age or sex)
Women are 2½ times more likely to be taking an
antidepressant than men (click here to
read a May 2011 article in the Harvard Mental Health Letter about
women and depression)
14% of non-Hispanic white people take antidepressants
compared with just 4% of non-Hispanic blacks and 3% of Mexican Americans
Less than a third of Americans who are taking a single antidepressants
(as opposed to two or more) have seen a mental health professional in the past
year
Antidepressant use does not vary by income status
Drug
|
Time Period
|
8th Graders
|
10th Graders
|
12th Graders
|
Any Prescription Drug
|
Past Year
|
-
|
-
|
15.00
|
Amphetamine
|
Past Year
|
2.60
|
5.90
|
8.70
|
Adderall
|
Past Year
|
1.80
|
4.40
|
7.40
|
Ritalin
|
Past Year
|
1.10
|
1.80
|
2.30
|
Narcotics other than Heroin
|
Past Year
|
-
|
-
|
7.10
|
Vicodin
|
Past Year
|
1.40
|
4.60
|
[5.30]
|
OxyContin
|
Past Year
|
2.00
|
3.40
|
3.60
|
Tranquilizers
|
Past Year
|
1.80
|
3.70
|
4.60
|
Monitoring the Future Study: Trends in
Prevalence of Various Drugs for 8th Graders, 10th Graders, and 12th Graders;
2013 (in percent)*
|
||||
* Data in brackets
indicate statist
Drug
|
Time Period
|
Ages 12 or Older
|
Ages 12 to 17
|
Ages 18 to 25
|
Ages 26 or Older
|
Psychotherapeutics (Nonmedical Use)
|
Lifetime
|
[20.90]
|
10.00
|
28.10
|
[21.00]
|
Past Year
|
[6.40]
|
6.60
|
[13.70]
|
[5.10]
|
|
Past Month
|
2.60
|
2.80
|
5.30
|
2.10
|
|
National Survey on Drug Use and Health:
Trends in Prevalence of Psychotherapeutics (Nonmedical Use) for Ages 12 or
Older, Ages 12 to 17, Ages 18 to 25, and Ages 26 or Older; 2012 (in
percent)*
|
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Type 2 Diabetes
Type 2 diabetes— long known to have an adverse effect on the
brain— has now been linked with the loss of brain matter.
Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), researchers studied
the brain structures of 614 patients with a mean age of 62, who had all been
diagnosed with type 2 diabetes for an average of 10 years. They found that
long-term diabetes was associated with the greatest loss of brain tissue –
suggesting brain atrophy.
“It’d been thought that most, if not all, of the effect of
diabetes on the brain was due to vascular disease that diabetics get and,
therefore, stroke,” lead study author Dr. R. Nick Bryan, professor emeritus of
the department of radiology at the Perleman School of Medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania, told FoxNews.com. “We found that in addition to
that, there’s sort of diffuse loss of brain tissue, atrophy… we think may have
a direct effect of the diabetes on the brain.”
Researchers noted that the greatest reduction of volume was
seen in the brain’s gray matter, where the organ’s neurons are located.
The shrinkage of gray matter is often regarded as the start of the
neurodegenerative process. Since patients with diabetes have been previously
shown to have a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease, the findings suggest
cognitive changes may be related to neurodegeneration.
“[We’re] not saying all [people with diabetes] will get
Alzheimer’s, but suggesting that many of them will have worse cognition and
worse thinking ability as they get older and probably more of them will get
neurodegeneration and Alzheimer’s, than non-Alzheimer’s patients,” Bryan said.
The findings suggest that for every 10 years of diabetes
duration, the brain of a diabetes patient looks approximately two years older
than that of a non-diabetic person – with regards to gray matter volume.
“One thing that’s pretty clear was that the adverse effect
of diabetes was significantly worse in patients who had diabetes longer,” Bryan said.
Researchers point out that, for people with diabetes, proper
care is a priority.
“[Patients] need to take the maximum effort to cooperate with
physicians… to manage diabetes and blood sugars as well as they possibly can to
try to decrease or prevent the damage of diabetes to the brain and ability to
think later on in life,” he said. “[Diabetes] significantly affects all the
organs in the body; the brain is one that is affected significantly perhaps in
not just one, but two ways— not just vascular that we know about, but as a
primary or direct assault on the brain.”
Legal Drugs for everyone
About half of all Americans in 2007-2010 reported taking one
or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days. Use increased with age; 1
in 4 children took one or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days compared
to 9 in 10 adults aged 65 and over.
Cardiovascular agents (used to treat high blood pressure,
heart disease or kidney disease) and cholesterol-lowering drugs were two of the
most commonly used classes of prescription drugs among adults aged 18-64 years
and 65 and over in 2007-2010. Nearly 18 percent (17.7) of adults aged
18-64 took at least one cardiovascular agent in the past 30 days.
The use of cholesterol-lowering drugs among those aged 18-64
has increased more than six-fold since 1988-1994, due in part to the
introduction and acceptance of statin drugs to lower cholesterol.
Other commonly used prescription drugs among adults aged
18-64 years were analgesics to relieve pain and antidepressants.
The prescribing of antibiotics during medical visits for
cold symptoms declined 39 percent between 1995-1996 and 2009-2010.
Among adults aged 65 and over, 70.2 percent took at least
one cardiovascular agent and 46.7 percent took a cholesterol-lowering drug in
the past 30 days in 2007-2010. The use of cholesterol-lowering drugs in
this age group has increased more than seven-fold since 1988-1994.
Other commonly used prescription drugs among those aged 65
and older included analgesics, blood thinners and diabetes medications.
In 2012, adults aged 18-64 years who were uninsured for all
or part of the past year were more than four times as likely to report not
getting needed prescription drugs due to cost as adults who were insured for
the whole year (22.4 percent compared to 5.0 percent).
The use of antidepressants among adults aged 18 and over
increased more than four-fold, from 2.4 percent to 10.8 percent between
1988-1994 and 2007-2010.
Drug poisoning deaths involving opioid analgesics among
those aged 15 and over more than tripled in the past decade, from 1.9 deaths
per 100,000 population in 1999-2000 to 6.6 in 2009-2010.
The annual growth in spending on retail prescription drugs
slowed from 14.7 percent in 2001 to 2.9 percent in 2011.
---------------------------------------
The National Institute of Drug Abuse has some pretty
shocking statistics detailing
just how bad America ’s
addiction has become. For example:
the US, which holds 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 75 percent of global prescription drug use;
52 million people over the age of 12 have used this medication for purposes outside of what they are intended for;
enough painkillers were prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult every four hours for a month;
over half of these pills are obtained for free from a friend or family member;
there are 5.1 million abusers of painkillers,
2.2 million who illegitimately take tranquilizers,
and 1.1 million needlessly popping stimulants.
the US, which holds 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 75 percent of global prescription drug use;
52 million people over the age of 12 have used this medication for purposes outside of what they are intended for;
enough painkillers were prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult every four hours for a month;
over half of these pills are obtained for free from a friend or family member;
there are 5.1 million abusers of painkillers,
2.2 million who illegitimately take tranquilizers,
and 1.1 million needlessly popping stimulants.
---------------------------------------
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, a non-profit medical and
research center, report that antibiotics, antidepressants and painkiller
opioids are the most common prescriptions given to Americans.
Twenty percent of U.S. patients were also found to be
on five or more prescription medications.
Nearly one in four women ages 50 to 64 were found to be on
an antidepressant, with 13 percent of the overall population also on
antidepressants.
Seventeen percent of people in the study were being
prescribed antibiotics, and 13 percent were on painkilling opioids.
As a whole, women and older adults received the most
prescription drugs.
Antidepressants and opioids were most common among young and
middle-aged adults.
The percentage of people who took at least one prescription
drug in the past month increased from 44 percent in 1999-2000 to 48 percent in
2007-08, the Mayo Clinic reports.
Expenditures on prescription drugs reached $250 billion in
2009, and accounted for 12 percent of total personal health care expenditures.
According to the CDC, the percent of persons using at least
one prescription drug in the past month increased nearly 50 percent between
2007 and 2010.
And the researchers said prescription drug spending will
only increase in the future.
America - you have got a problem...
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