Grace E. Jackson
“Drug-Induced Dementia: A Perfect Crime”
By Lynne McTaggart
August 6th, 2010
A Brief Review of Psychiatrist Grace Jackson’s Whistle-Blower Book
Just occasionally, I come across a medical hero, a doctor
willing to break the conspiracy of silence that exists among doctors about the
damage caused by their tools.
My hero of the hour is an American psychiatrist called
Grace E. Jackson. Dr. Jackson is utterly,
refreshingly horrified by psychiatric medicine. In fact, she is horrified by
most forms of pharmaceutical medicine, period. She spends her life lecturing and
writing about the dangers of drugs and their ability to cause mental illness.
So incensed is she about the current state of affairs that she felt compelled to
self-publish a whistle-blower, entitled Drug-induced Dementia, which
painstakingly catalogues a vast amount of scientific evidence showing that
modern medicine is the primary culprit behind all forms of dementia, one of the
most rampant epidemics of our time.
A new use for rocket fuel
One of her more outrageous snippets of information concerns the fact that in the
1950s, when doctors first began to treat psychiatric patients pharmacologically,
they discovered that synthetic dye and rocket-fuel derivatives actually had what
they considered some sort of medicinal effect. Thorazine (chlorpromazine), the
first antipsychotic, was born.
There was only one hitch – the drug caused the patient to become so lethargic
that his symptoms aped those of sleeping sickness. The doctors also noticed that
over time, the drugs caused all the hallmarks of Parkinson’s disease: abnormal
gait, tremor, dementia and involuntary movement. They also stupefied the
patient, flattening out all feeling or excitation — leaving behind, in effect, a
vegetable.
Nevertheless, with a brand of logic peculiar to modern medicine, these
debilitating side effects were welcomed, on the premise that they were a damned
sight better than a crazed hallucinator.
In fact, doctors began to view the arrival of Parkinsonian effects as a
benchmark in a patient’s therapeutic.
Not-so-subtle brain damage
The damage caused by psychiatric medicine is only the tip of the iceberg. I
began to look into this issue myself and discovered a good number of the major
classes of drugs that doctors give patients as they age bring on dementia.
Heart drugs, cholesterol lowering drugs, sleeping pills, antidepressants,
narcotics, stimulants, including Ritalin, the ADHD drug given to children, anti-cholinergics,
anti-epileptic drugs, to name just a few, all can damage the structure of the
brain.
Anti-depressants shrink the hippocampus of the brain, and statins lower crucial
fats, or lipids, which compose much of brain tissue.
Beta-blockers and other drugs that aggressively lower blood pressure, such as
calcium channel blockers and ACE inhibitors, also lower blood flow to the brain,
creating all the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s Disease
Even good old painkillers – the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory class of drugs –
can cause a variety of cognitive changes, from delirium to disturbances in
memory and concentration.
Many of these drugs actually shrink brain volume, destroying the crucial fatty
structures of brain cells, or causing abnormal accumulation of tissue in vital
brain structures.
Drug cocktails
Even though they represent only one-seventh of the population, the over-65s take
one-third of all prescription drugs – and usually a cocktail of them. The
average senior is on six drugs at a time, many of which can affect the brain.
Given the fact that some 90 per cent of Americans from their mid-fifties onward
are taking at least one drug regularly, and nearly one-third are taking five or
more drugs, it’s small wonder that dementia is one of the world’s fastest
growing diseases, now absorbing $90 billion per year, or one-third of America’s
entire Medicare bill. It’s now expected that one in four of us will have some
form of dementia by the time we reach 80.
To put this cost into perspective, America is now spending about 1 per cent of
the US’s entire gross domestic product on a largely iatrogenic (doctor-induced)
condition. Medicine has reached the point where it is chasing its own tail,
attempting to mop up with yet more drugs and treatments a vast and costly
problem it has caused in the first place.
Against nature
I tell you all this not simply to rant against the massive carnage caused by our
faulty medical system, but also to illustrate the enormous repercussions that
occur whenever we go against our truest nature. The drug-caused dementia
epidemic is simply the result of the ongoing refusal of our current medical
model to consider the body as a holistic entity. Whenever we atomize anything,
but most particularly the human body – taking it apart and attempting to treat
it in separate pieces – we invite calamity.
Source:
www.theintentionexperiment.com/against-holism.htm