http://jeffshealthyliving.com Jeff Wendland's Guide to a Fit & Healthy Lifestyle Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ (NaturalNews) Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal . Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine. Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo. "Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes. Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on "psychopathology" and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic "Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course. "With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs," Shorter writes. U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as "nerves," "melancholia" or "manic-depressive illness." These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed. "Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms," Shorter said. "A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has 'social anxiety disorder' or 'seasonal affective disorder.' ... The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches." In the 1950s and '60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis -- perceiving it as focusing excessively on "unconscious psychic conflicts" -- and toward a more "scientific" model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of "major depression" and "bipolar disorder," even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, "major depression" absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, "neurotic depression" and "melancholia." "This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases," he writes. DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: "To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large." For example, the new disorder of "psychosis risk syndrome" associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that "even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic." The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics. Symptoms of "psychosis risk syndrome" include such vague descriptors as "disorganized speech." Other new "disorders" include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. "Minor neurocognitive disorder" describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper. "DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases," Shorter says, "turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity." Sources for this story include: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083700227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle.

Link:
The total failure of modern psychiatry ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ (NaturalNews) A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion. First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn't hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there's no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn't undergo those screening tests. The Danish research team looked at annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions where breast cancer screening programs were offered to the public and compared this to data collected in non-screened regions throughout the rest of the country. To get a broad picture of the trend toward more or less breast cancer mortality, they analyzed breast malignancy rates in the decade before the screening was started and also looked at the ten years after screening was introduced. The results showed that breast cancer deaths declined by 1% in women between the ages of 55 and 74 in the areas where regular mammography was frequently used. However, breast cancer rates went down more -- 2% per year -- in women of the same age living in non-screened areas. And this trend was the same in younger women, too. For those between the ages of 35 and 54, breast cancer mortality went down by 5% per year in the screened areas but it went down more, 6% per year, in the non-screened areas during the same time frame. The researchers noted that there's no evidence that the drops in cancer deaths in the women screened for breast cancer had anything to do directly with mammograms, either. "We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening program on breast cancer mortality," the researchers concluded in their study, which was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) . "The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas and in younger age groups, and are more likely explained by changes in risk factors and improved treatment than by screening mammography." The BMJ study also noted that for women in the oldest age group (75-84 years), there was virtually no breast cancer mortality difference between those who were in areas where breast screening was pushed on the public and in non-screened areas. As NaturalNews has previously reported, in the U.S. even elderly women who are not expected to live long because they suffer from severe dementia are often regularly subjected to the expense, discomfort and added x-ray exposure of mammography (http://www.naturalnews.com/028095_mammograms_Alzheimers.html). Two members of the same Danish research team that published the BMJ study also published an additional paper in the March edition of the Polish medical journal Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej (Pol Arch Med Wewn) . It directly addressed the balance between the supposed benefits and known harms of cancer screening programs. "By attending screening with mammography some women will avoid dying from breast cancer or receive less aggressive treatment. But many more women will be over-diagnosed, receive needless treatment, have a false-positive result, or live more years as a patient with breast cancer," they concluded. Moreover, as readers of NaturalNews are aware, studies over the past few years have actually implicated mammograms in causing some breast cancers to develop in the first place. For example, a study published in the Archives of of Internal Medicine in 2008 found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). For more information : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332505 http://www.naturalnews.com/028407_mammograms_radiation.html

Excerpt from: New study: Breast cancer deaths lower in areas without mammograms ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com Jeff Wendland's Guide to a Fit & Healthy Lifestyle Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://jeffshealthyliving.com Jeff Wendland's Guide to a Fit & Healthy Lifestyle Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ (NaturalNews) Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal . Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine. Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo. "Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes. Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on "psychopathology" and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic "Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course. "With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs," Shorter writes. U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as "nerves," "melancholia" or "manic-depressive illness." These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed. "Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms," Shorter said. "A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has 'social anxiety disorder' or 'seasonal affective disorder.' ... The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches." In the 1950s and '60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis -- perceiving it as focusing excessively on "unconscious psychic conflicts" -- and toward a more "scientific" model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of "major depression" and "bipolar disorder," even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, "major depression" absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, "neurotic depression" and "melancholia." "This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases," he writes. DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: "To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large." For example, the new disorder of "psychosis risk syndrome" associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that "even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic." The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics. Symptoms of "psychosis risk syndrome" include such vague descriptors as "disorganized speech." Other new "disorders" include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. "Minor neurocognitive disorder" describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper. "DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases," Shorter says, "turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity." Sources for this story include: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083700227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle.

Link:
The total failure of modern psychiatry ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ (NaturalNews) A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion. First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn't hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there's no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn't undergo those screening tests. The Danish research team looked at annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions where breast cancer screening programs were offered to the public and compared this to data collected in non-screened regions throughout the rest of the country. To get a broad picture of the trend toward more or less breast cancer mortality, they analyzed breast malignancy rates in the decade before the screening was started and also looked at the ten years after screening was introduced. The results showed that breast cancer deaths declined by 1% in women between the ages of 55 and 74 in the areas where regular mammography was frequently used. However, breast cancer rates went down more -- 2% per year -- in women of the same age living in non-screened areas. And this trend was the same in younger women, too. For those between the ages of 35 and 54, breast cancer mortality went down by 5% per year in the screened areas but it went down more, 6% per year, in the non-screened areas during the same time frame. The researchers noted that there's no evidence that the drops in cancer deaths in the women screened for breast cancer had anything to do directly with mammograms, either. "We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening program on breast cancer mortality," the researchers concluded in their study, which was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) . "The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas and in younger age groups, and are more likely explained by changes in risk factors and improved treatment than by screening mammography." The BMJ study also noted that for women in the oldest age group (75-84 years), there was virtually no breast cancer mortality difference between those who were in areas where breast screening was pushed on the public and in non-screened areas. As NaturalNews has previously reported, in the U.S. even elderly women who are not expected to live long because they suffer from severe dementia are often regularly subjected to the expense, discomfort and added x-ray exposure of mammography (http://www.naturalnews.com/028095_mammograms_Alzheimers.html). Two members of the same Danish research team that published the BMJ study also published an additional paper in the March edition of the Polish medical journal Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej (Pol Arch Med Wewn) . It directly addressed the balance between the supposed benefits and known harms of cancer screening programs. "By attending screening with mammography some women will avoid dying from breast cancer or receive less aggressive treatment. But many more women will be over-diagnosed, receive needless treatment, have a false-positive result, or live more years as a patient with breast cancer," they concluded. Moreover, as readers of NaturalNews are aware, studies over the past few years have actually implicated mammograms in causing some breast cancers to develop in the first place. For example, a study published in the Archives of of Internal Medicine in 2008 found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). For more information : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332505 http://www.naturalnews.com/028407_mammograms_radiation.html

Excerpt from: New study: Breast cancer deaths lower in areas without mammograms ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ (NaturalNews) Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal . Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine. Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo. "Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes. Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on "psychopathology" and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic "Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course. "With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs," Shorter writes. U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as "nerves," "melancholia" or "manic-depressive illness." These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed. "Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms," Shorter said. "A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has 'social anxiety disorder' or 'seasonal affective disorder.' ... The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches." In the 1950s and '60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis -- perceiving it as focusing excessively on "unconscious psychic conflicts" -- and toward a more "scientific" model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of "major depression" and "bipolar disorder," even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, "major depression" absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, "neurotic depression" and "melancholia." "This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases," he writes. DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: "To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large." For example, the new disorder of "psychosis risk syndrome" associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that "even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic." The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics. Symptoms of "psychosis risk syndrome" include such vague descriptors as "disorganized speech." Other new "disorders" include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. "Minor neurocognitive disorder" describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper. "DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases," Shorter says, "turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity." Sources for this story include: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083700227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle.

Link:
The total failure of modern psychiatry ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com Jeff Wendland's Guide to a Fit & Healthy Lifestyle Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ (NaturalNews) Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal . Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine. Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo. "Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes. Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on "psychopathology" and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic "Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course. "With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs," Shorter writes. U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as "nerves," "melancholia" or "manic-depressive illness." These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed. "Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms," Shorter said. "A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has 'social anxiety disorder' or 'seasonal affective disorder.' ... The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches." In the 1950s and '60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis -- perceiving it as focusing excessively on "unconscious psychic conflicts" -- and toward a more "scientific" model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of "major depression" and "bipolar disorder," even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, "major depression" absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, "neurotic depression" and "melancholia." "This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases," he writes. DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: "To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large." For example, the new disorder of "psychosis risk syndrome" associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that "even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic." The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics. Symptoms of "psychosis risk syndrome" include such vague descriptors as "disorganized speech." Other new "disorders" include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. "Minor neurocognitive disorder" describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper. "DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases," Shorter says, "turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity." Sources for this story include: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083700227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle.

Link:
The total failure of modern psychiatry ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ (NaturalNews) A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion. First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn't hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there's no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn't undergo those screening tests. The Danish research team looked at annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions where breast cancer screening programs were offered to the public and compared this to data collected in non-screened regions throughout the rest of the country. To get a broad picture of the trend toward more or less breast cancer mortality, they analyzed breast malignancy rates in the decade before the screening was started and also looked at the ten years after screening was introduced. The results showed that breast cancer deaths declined by 1% in women between the ages of 55 and 74 in the areas where regular mammography was frequently used. However, breast cancer rates went down more -- 2% per year -- in women of the same age living in non-screened areas. And this trend was the same in younger women, too. For those between the ages of 35 and 54, breast cancer mortality went down by 5% per year in the screened areas but it went down more, 6% per year, in the non-screened areas during the same time frame. The researchers noted that there's no evidence that the drops in cancer deaths in the women screened for breast cancer had anything to do directly with mammograms, either. "We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening program on breast cancer mortality," the researchers concluded in their study, which was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) . "The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas and in younger age groups, and are more likely explained by changes in risk factors and improved treatment than by screening mammography." The BMJ study also noted that for women in the oldest age group (75-84 years), there was virtually no breast cancer mortality difference between those who were in areas where breast screening was pushed on the public and in non-screened areas. As NaturalNews has previously reported, in the U.S. even elderly women who are not expected to live long because they suffer from severe dementia are often regularly subjected to the expense, discomfort and added x-ray exposure of mammography (http://www.naturalnews.com/028095_mammograms_Alzheimers.html). Two members of the same Danish research team that published the BMJ study also published an additional paper in the March edition of the Polish medical journal Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej (Pol Arch Med Wewn) . It directly addressed the balance between the supposed benefits and known harms of cancer screening programs. "By attending screening with mammography some women will avoid dying from breast cancer or receive less aggressive treatment. But many more women will be over-diagnosed, receive needless treatment, have a false-positive result, or live more years as a patient with breast cancer," they concluded. Moreover, as readers of NaturalNews are aware, studies over the past few years have actually implicated mammograms in causing some breast cancers to develop in the first place. For example, a study published in the Archives of of Internal Medicine in 2008 found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). For more information : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332505 http://www.naturalnews.com/028407_mammograms_radiation.html

Excerpt from: New study: Breast cancer deaths lower in areas without mammograms ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ (NaturalNews) A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion. First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn't hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there's no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn't undergo those screening tests. The Danish research team looked at annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions where breast cancer screening programs were offered to the public and compared this to data collected in non-screened regions throughout the rest of the country. To get a broad picture of the trend toward more or less breast cancer mortality, they analyzed breast malignancy rates in the decade before the screening was started and also looked at the ten years after screening was introduced. The results showed that breast cancer deaths declined by 1% in women between the ages of 55 and 74 in the areas where regular mammography was frequently used. However, breast cancer rates went down more -- 2% per year -- in women of the same age living in non-screened areas. And this trend was the same in younger women, too. For those between the ages of 35 and 54, breast cancer mortality went down by 5% per year in the screened areas but it went down more, 6% per year, in the non-screened areas during the same time frame. The researchers noted that there's no evidence that the drops in cancer deaths in the women screened for breast cancer had anything to do directly with mammograms, either. "We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening program on breast cancer mortality," the researchers concluded in their study, which was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) . "The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas and in younger age groups, and are more likely explained by changes in risk factors and improved treatment than by screening mammography." The BMJ study also noted that for women in the oldest age group (75-84 years), there was virtually no breast cancer mortality difference between those who were in areas where breast screening was pushed on the public and in non-screened areas. As NaturalNews has previously reported, in the U.S. even elderly women who are not expected to live long because they suffer from severe dementia are often regularly subjected to the expense, discomfort and added x-ray exposure of mammography (http://www.naturalnews.com/028095_mammograms_Alzheimers.html). Two members of the same Danish research team that published the BMJ study also published an additional paper in the March edition of the Polish medical journal Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej (Pol Arch Med Wewn) . It directly addressed the balance between the supposed benefits and known harms of cancer screening programs. "By attending screening with mammography some women will avoid dying from breast cancer or receive less aggressive treatment. But many more women will be over-diagnosed, receive needless treatment, have a false-positive result, or live more years as a patient with breast cancer," they concluded. Moreover, as readers of NaturalNews are aware, studies over the past few years have actually implicated mammograms in causing some breast cancers to develop in the first place. For example, a study published in the Archives of of Internal Medicine in 2008 found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). For more information : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332505 http://www.naturalnews.com/028407_mammograms_radiation.html

Excerpt from: New study: Breast cancer deaths lower in areas without mammograms ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com Jeff Wendland's Guide to a Fit & Healthy Lifestyle Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/ (NaturalNews) Modern psychiatry went wrong when it embraced the idea that the mind should be treated with drugs, says Edward Shorter of the University of Toronto, writing in the Wall Street Journal . Shorter studies the history of psychiatry and medicine. Modern U.S. psychiatry has adopted a philosophy that psychological diseases arise from chemical imbalances and therefore have a very specific cluster of symptoms, he says, in spite of evidence that the difference between many so-called disorders is minimal or nonexistent. These "disorders" are then treated with expensive drugs that are no more effective than a placebo. "Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications," he writes. Shorter calls for U.S. psychiatry to abandon its emphasis on "psychopathology" and instead adopt the European approach, which focuses on the symptoms and needs of people as individuals. Yet the draft of the latest edition of psychiatric diagnostic "Bible," the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), shows that U.S. psychiatry has no intention of changing course. "With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs," Shorter writes. U.S. psychiatry was not always obsessed with psychopharmacology, he notes. Its early years were marked by a psychoanalytic approach that categorized mental disorders in broad, fluid categories such as "nerves," "melancholia" or "manic-depressive illness." These categories sufficed because similar treatments would work for people suffering from any version thereof: lithium treated both mania and severe depression, for example, while the specific symptoms experienced by an anxious person had little influence on the therapies needed. "Our psychopathological lingo today offers little improvement on these sturdy terms," Shorter said. "A patient with the same symptoms today might be told he has 'social anxiety disorder' or 'seasonal affective disorder.' ... The new disorders all respond to the same drugs, so in terms of treatment, the differentiation is meaningless and of benefit mainly to pharmaceutical companies that market drugs for these niches." In the 1950s and '60s, a new wave of psychiatrists sought to turn away from psychoanalysis -- perceiving it as focusing excessively on "unconscious psychic conflicts" -- and toward a more "scientific" model instead. As a result, the DSM-III introduced the vague new categories of "major depression" and "bipolar disorder," even though evidence suggests that there is no substantial difference between the two conditions. At the same time, "major depression" absorbed what Shorter calls two very different conditions, "neurotic depression" and "melancholia." "This would be like incorporating tuberculosis and mumps into the same diagnosis, simply because they are both infectious diseases," he writes. DSM-V only continues the trend of extending the disordered label to more and more normal people, Shorter warns: "To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large." For example, the new disorder of "psychosis risk syndrome" associates a whole new class of people with full-blown schizophrenia, under the logic, Shorter says, that "even if you aren't floridly psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, eccentric behavior can nonetheless awaken the suspicion that you might someday become psychotic." The implication, of course, is that such people should be treated with antipsychotics. Symptoms of "psychosis risk syndrome" include such vague descriptors as "disorganized speech." Other new "disorders" include hoarding, mixed anxiety-depression and binge eating. "Minor neurocognitive disorder" describes a reduction in cognitive function over time, such as that normally experienced by people over the age of 50, while "temper dysregulation disorder with dysphoria" refers to children who suffer from outbursts of temper. "DSM-V accelerates the trend of making variants on the spectrum of everyday behavior into diseases," Shorter says, "turning grief into depression, apprehension into anxiety, and boyishness into hyperactivity." Sources for this story include: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704188104575083700227601116.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle.

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The total failure of modern psychiatry ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/06/the-total-failure-of-modern-psychiatry/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:00:00 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/ (NaturalNews) A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion. First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn't hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there's no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn't undergo those screening tests. The Danish research team looked at annual changes in breast cancer deaths in two Danish regions where breast cancer screening programs were offered to the public and compared this to data collected in non-screened regions throughout the rest of the country. To get a broad picture of the trend toward more or less breast cancer mortality, they analyzed breast malignancy rates in the decade before the screening was started and also looked at the ten years after screening was introduced. The results showed that breast cancer deaths declined by 1% in women between the ages of 55 and 74 in the areas where regular mammography was frequently used. However, breast cancer rates went down more -- 2% per year -- in women of the same age living in non-screened areas. And this trend was the same in younger women, too. For those between the ages of 35 and 54, breast cancer mortality went down by 5% per year in the screened areas but it went down more, 6% per year, in the non-screened areas during the same time frame. The researchers noted that there's no evidence that the drops in cancer deaths in the women screened for breast cancer had anything to do directly with mammograms, either. "We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening program on breast cancer mortality," the researchers concluded in their study, which was just published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) . "The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas and in younger age groups, and are more likely explained by changes in risk factors and improved treatment than by screening mammography." The BMJ study also noted that for women in the oldest age group (75-84 years), there was virtually no breast cancer mortality difference between those who were in areas where breast screening was pushed on the public and in non-screened areas. As NaturalNews has previously reported, in the U.S. even elderly women who are not expected to live long because they suffer from severe dementia are often regularly subjected to the expense, discomfort and added x-ray exposure of mammography (http://www.naturalnews.com/028095_mammograms_Alzheimers.html). Two members of the same Danish research team that published the BMJ study also published an additional paper in the March edition of the Polish medical journal Polskie Archiwum Medycyny Wewnetrznej (Pol Arch Med Wewn) . It directly addressed the balance between the supposed benefits and known harms of cancer screening programs. "By attending screening with mammography some women will avoid dying from breast cancer or receive less aggressive treatment. But many more women will be over-diagnosed, receive needless treatment, have a false-positive result, or live more years as a patient with breast cancer," they concluded. Moreover, as readers of NaturalNews are aware, studies over the past few years have actually implicated mammograms in causing some breast cancers to develop in the first place. For example, a study published in the Archives of of Internal Medicine in 2008 found that the start of screening mammography programs throughout Europe has been associated with an increased incidence of breast cancer (http://www.naturalnews.com/024901.html). For more information : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332715 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20332505 http://www.naturalnews.com/028407_mammograms_radiation.html

Excerpt from: New study: Breast cancer deaths lower in areas without mammograms ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/04/new-study-breast-cancer-deaths-lower-in-areas-without-mammograms/feed/ 0 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/01/organic-dairies-watch-the-good-times-turn-bad/ http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/01/organic-dairies-watch-the-good-times-turn-bad/#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:00:41 +0000 http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/01/organic-dairies-watch-the-good-times-turn-bad/ As the trend toward organic food consumption slows after years of explosive growth, no sector is in direr shape than the $1.3 billion organic milk industry.

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Organic Dairies Watch the Good Times Turn Bad ]]> http://jeffshealthyliving.com/2010/01/organic-dairies-watch-the-good-times-turn-bad/feed/ 0