Blog posts

They Know More, You Know Less      By Robert Carter/August 10, 2024      That tends to be a conventional patient’s view of doctors.      It’s not without reason, of course. Doctors have a four year college degree, three to four more years of medical school, internship practice, ongoing education in their medical field, and years of experience with patients.      They should know more than you do.      However, that does not mean you have to surrender your personal integrity to them for making a decision about your own health…physical or mental.      Informed consent laws rose from the mistreatment of four women in the early twentieth century in America and were refined further through the Nuremberg Trials after WWII which prosecuted Nazi doctors and psychiatrists for their enforced experimentation on concentration camp victims.      Today they are your ethical and legal protection from making ill-advised decisions about your own health. A doctor – not a physician’s assistant, or technician, or office staff – is required to fully disclose all aspects of the proposed treatment. That means he or she has to tell you the evidence for your diagnosis, the expected result of his proposed treatment, the expected result of any alternative treatment, and the consequences of you doing nothing at all to treat your condition.      With strictly physical conditions, informed consent works like a charm. That diagnosis is based on the results of some physical assessment – blood tests, MRI’s, CAT scans, etc. – which reveal a verifiable physical condition, and then the patient is told about the recommended treatment, the alternative treatments, and no treatment.      With mental conditions, however, there is no charm. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is the psychiatrist’s bible for “mental illness” and lists three hundred mental or emotional disorders. At least that’s what they call them. In fact, they are actually only a description of observed symptoms as they have been voted on by a panel of psychiatrists for inclusion in the DSM.      There is no laboratory test that can be given to find a physical cause for these symptoms. There is no such thing as a detectable “chemical imbalance.”      So the first step of the informed consent process for the diagnosis of a mental condition cannot come from a verifiable fact that is the result of a laboratory test. Therefore that “diagnosis” is only an opinion. And today that opinion most often comes from your general practitioner. Eighty percent of all prescriptions for antidepressants come from regular doctors, not from psychiatrists. They may be experts about the body, but they are not experts about the mind.      You may know more than they do about your own mind…or at least as much. If you are prescribed an antidepressant or psychotropic drug, informed consent law requires that you be told about all of the “side effects” of that prescribed antidepressant or psychotropic drug, the alternative treatments that are available, and the consequences of doing nothing.      When you’re sad after a relationship break-up or the death of a favorite pet, yes, it hurts. And yes a Xanax might numb you sufficiently to not feel the pain. But as you know yourself from your own past experience, that emotional stress from the loss does often go away after awhile all by itself. That is how life works.      So, you really may know more than “they” do, and that knowledge is what you can weigh against what you are told through informed consent law about the effects and the side effects of any prescribed medication.      You don’t have to turn yourself into a temporary zombie with a drug that “may increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior”…a “side effect” far worse than the emotional condition you’re trying to handle.

Per Psychiatry, You’re Nothing but a Piece of Meat By Robert Carter/July 30, 2024 There is no scientific test that has ever shown a chemical imbalance in the brain as the cause of unwanted emotions. That whole idea came from experiments with rodents in the nineteen-thirties which suggested that paranoia was caused by high levels of dopamine in the brain. While that might or might not be factually true for rats, a rodent is not a human being. Perhaps the psychiatrists’ equation of a rat with a human being was what led them to be okay with the brutality of the treatments they performed on people’s bodies in the thirties to try to “cure” the behavior they labeled as schizophrenia. First came their removal of teeth, appendixes, ovaries, testes, colons, and other body parts to eliminate the “infection” that was causing a patient’s schizophrenia. Surgically removing the ovaries and testes, of course, equaled sterilization, akin to what the Nazi psychiatrists were doing then in the concentration camps. Then came insulin shock therapy. Patients – or more accurately, victims – were put into comas by massive daily injections of insulin into their bodies for weeks on end. Few ever regained their mental acuity afterward. Next came the lobotomy. In the mid nineteen-thirties Antonio Egas Moniz was allowed to drill two small holes in the skull of “patients” from a Portugese asylum and through those openings cut the nerve fibers between the front of the brain and the rest of the brain. It was “blind surgery,” as the psychiatrist could not see what he was actually cutting inside the person’s head. In the late nineteen-thirties American psychiatrist Walter Freeman announced his “improved” lobotomy procedure. He hammered an ice pick through the victim’s eye socket and “wiggled it around” to sever nerve connections in the brain. So enthusiastic was he about this procedure that he began a cross country road trip he dubbed “Operation Icepick” and he drove from one state mental hospital to another to promote his operation being used on patients who had long since lost their right to consent to such barbaric treatment. In 1940 alone, an estimated five thousand lobotomies were performed in America Then came electroconvulsive therapy, another brutal assault on a body thanks to psychiatry’s misguided attempt to “cure” schizophrenia. A seizure was induced in an anesthetized patient by attaching electrodes to the sides of the head and unleashing up to four hundred volts of electricity across the brain. In 1952 many of these barbaric psychiatric procedures – so many of which were hidden from public views by being inflicted on the innocent inmates of psychiatric institutions – were to a large degree replaced by psychiatrists prescribing psychotropic drugs. In that year the FDA approved the use of Thorazine, the first drug to be approved for the treatment of mental disorders. With Thorazine, there were no holes left in the eye sockets, no broken bones from massive electrical shock, no permanent catatonia from recurring insulin overdose. Instead, you just took a pill. But the results were similar. One ad for Thorazine during its first major Big Pharma drug marketing campaign stated that it “reduces or eliminates the need for restraint and seclusion” and “reduces destruction of personal and hospital property.” That marketing soon expanded from asylums to the general public. By 1964 fifty million prescriptions for Thorazine had been filled. The income of its Big Pharma manufacturer, Smith, Kline and French, skyrocketed the company’s profit with an eightfold increase in revenue. Psychiatry’s war with drugs had begun. It was a war against us. A war justified by the still unproven idea of a chemical imbalance in our brains.