medication

As I’ve mentioned previously, the drug companies heavily target my CAMHS service with drug lunches, sponsored conferences and freebie handouts, usually for ADHD medications.

Just browsing through the NMC Code of Conduct, I notice one of the obligations of a nurse is that:

You must refuse any gifts, favours or hospitality that might be interpreted as an attempt to gain preferential treatment

Well, I’d say that whenever a drug company provides us with lunch, gives us some free pens or post-it notes, or sponsors a conference, they’re certainly hoping to gain preferential treatment for their medication. They’re certainly not doing it because they think we look hungry or could do with a pen.

Therefore, surely that means that all this big pharma schmoozing and gifting is causing nurses to breach our own code of conduct regularly, and on a massive scale?

(For more on this sort of thing, please visit the No Free Lunch website)

This wouldn’t be Mental Nurse without a mention of this news story.

I have to say, I have only read the one article about it and not looked any deeper, but incase anyone missed it it’s here.

A NEW drug capable of halting Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks was hailed yesterday as a “hugely exciting” development in the battle against the devastating condition.

The drug, developed and tested on patients in Scotland, slows down the progression of Alzheimer’s by as much as 81 per cent.

Following on from the myth of the antipsychotic and the research apparently showing that antidepressants don’t work either, here, comes this.

“New schizophrenia drugs no better, Dutch team find”

The research apparently shows that the new generation of atypical antipsychotic drugs are no more effective than the older first generation of antipsychotic medication. Seroquel, Zyprexia, Geodon (available in the US), and Solian were compared with Haloperidol. Although the newer drugs were not found to be any more effective in treating psychotic symptoms the compliance rate was significantly better.

Over the following 12 months, 63 patients on Halopreidol stopped treatment compared to 51 on Seroquel, 32 on Solian, 31 on Geodon and 30 on Zyprexia

Since Mental has asked us to take over his mantle, I’ll do a post that I know is dear to his heart - the vast quantities of utter hogwash that come under the heading of complementary therapies.

I recently passed by a kinesiology stall at a festival. Kinesiology, if you haven’t heard of it, claims to find health problems by…er…getting you to wiggle your arm up and down. For some reason, they seem particularly obsessed with rooting out food intolerances.

Quite apart from the sheer ridiculousness of this method, I was especially struck by a sentence in the stall’s advertising leaflets, describing how they found the alleged “food intolerances”.

Some food intolerances only require a few weeks detox from the food in question, and then you can start eating it again.

Now, I’ve never heard of a food intolerance that simply goes away after a few weeks of “detox”. Therefore a cynical bugger like me could start to suspect that there never was a food intolerance in the first place, and any perceived beneficial effect from the “detox” was purely down to placebo effect.

The capacity of otherwise educated, intelligent people to believe in and defend this drivel amazes me. So, I’m now going to present to you Zarathustra’s Top 4 Bollocks Justifications for Complementary Therapies.

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I was reading the excellent site Remembering Old Asylums and Hospitals. As always it made me try to imagine what things were like back in the day. A fair chunk of this post will be about language and how it is used, I hope to have OSB wound up enough to make a high pitched shrieking noise, like an angry kettle. (For the younger readers kettles used to whistle when the water was boiling) If I am feeling brave I will post my ideas on a brand new nursing classification system for the people we work with.

A sneak peak at the ICD11 and DSMV.

We will start with something easy. Major and Minor Tranquilisers.

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