By Johanna Ryan
A recent New York Times article told the troubling story of two women who died in a clinical trial of a new Alzheimer’s drug.
Jean and Genna
One in particular stayed on my mind. Her name was Jean Terrien, and she was just about my age. Like me, she lived in the Chicago area, perhaps a dozen miles up the road, and had been retired for just about a year.
Jean’s story had a lot to say about a topic much discussed on RxISK: Informed consent—or the lack of it—when starting a new drug.
Jean did not have Alzheimer’s, but she was concerned about the disease, like lots of women our age. She had more reasons to worry than most: She had already lost close relatives to Alzheimer’s. It seemed to run in her family. Now she was noticing some memory loss herself, enough to qualify as “mild cognitive impairment.” So she volunteered as a research subject for a new drug called lecanemab, or Leqembi. The study was run by the US biotech firm Biogen and Eisai Pharmaceuticals of Japan.
Before the study began, Biogen/Eisai gave Jean a few tests. As it turned out, she had an inherited risk for Alzheimer’s: a gene called ApoE4. One copy of that gene raises your chances of developing Alzheimer’s. Jean had two copies, making her risk even higher. But that’s not all: People like her also face an increased risk of serious side effects on drugs like Leqembi. It can cause brain bleeding and swelling which can be disabling and even fatal.
Thanks to their testing, Biogen/Eisai knew that. But they didn’t tell Jean. In September 2022, after her third infusion of Leqembi, she suffered an apparent stroke and was taken to a local emergency room. The staff administered tPA, an anti-clotting drug commonly given as initial therapy for stroke. Jean began screaming, and it took eight people to hold her down. She was rushed to intensive care and placed on a ventilator. Three days later she died. She was 65.
Genna Lane, also a double-ApoE4 carrier, died that month under very similar circumstances, also after her third Leqembi infusion. Genna was enrolled at the Charter Research trial center in The Villages, the large Florida retirement community where she lived. Dozens of other subjects suffered severe brain bleeds and swelling.
Leqembi and Kisunla
In a similar Alzheimer’s drug trial, pharma giant Eli Lilly made the same choice to test subjects for ApoE4 without telling them their results or the extra risks they faced on its drug donanemab (Kisunla). In all, 274 double-carriers were enrolled in the Leqembi trial, and 289 in Lilly’s trial of Kisunla.
Leqembi was granted “accelerated approval” by the FDA in January 2023, and full approval in July 2023. In July 2024, FDA granted similar approval to Kisunla. The Prescribing Information listed the potential serious adverse effects and known risk factors, but left the final decision to each doctor’s judgment. There was no exclusion for double-carriers like Jean and Genna.
How did these two drug companies get away with such an arrangement?
Alzheimer’s
Alzheimer’s is definitely a brain disease. And it’s a fearsome one: unlike some forms of dementia, it is progressive and eventually fatal. Left to run its course, it can steal everything you value—your reason, your personality and your closest relationships—before it ends your life.
However, we still don’t know what causes it. A definitive diagnosis can only be made after death, based on a history of dementia and a finding of plaques in the brain formed by a protein called beta-amyloid. For over 20 years, the search for a cause—and a potential cure—has centered on those plaques. Leqembi is the latest in a series of monoclonal antibodies which bind to and remove amyloid plaques from the brain.
But while the drugs succeed in removing the plaques, none have been able to stop the disease, much less reverse it. At most they’ve demonstrated only a slight decline in the rate at which patients go downhill. Leqembi has been more successful than most. While virtually all patients in the trial saw their scores on cognitive assessments decline after eighteen months, that decline was 27% slower for patients on Leqembi than in the placebo group.
Drug companies have touted those extremely modest results as buying precious time for patients—perhaps up to six months’ freedom from further decline. But in fact it represents a mere 1.5 point advantage on an 18-point rating scale of cognitive abilities. It’s not at all clear this effect is big enough to make a real difference in daily lives—prolonging an ability to live at home or maintain relationships with loved ones, for example.
And after 20+ years of anti-amyloid drug development, a broader question remains: Are the plaques the cause of the disease, or are they just a form of collateral damage? Many older people have beta-amyloid plaques without showing any signs of Alzheimer’s—and some Alzheimer’s patients don’t have plaques.
After all, the association between falling leaves and the onset of winter in Chicago is pretty robust, too. But no one claims that clearing the fallen leaves from our streets (or spraying trees with glue to keep the leaves in place) will delay the onset of winter. The link between plaques and Alzheimer’s may be just that illusory—or at best only one of many factors.
In other words, Biogen/Eisai/Eli Lilly cannot promise (or even suggest) that their drugs will hold you together long enough to celebrate your grandchild’s graduation. Nor can they warn you that without “treatment” you will be too impaired by that time to recognize your grandchildren.
A Dreadful Gamble
Arrayed against that faint hope of reprieve are the drugs’ potentially catastrophic side effects. The worst are brain hemorrhages and swelling, re-branded by drug companies as “ARIA” (or amyloid-associated imaging abnormalities). ARIA may cause only mild symptoms or none at all, at least in the short run—but it can also be crippling or even deadly. In recent trials 41% of patients on Leqembi experienced ARIA in some form.
The doctor who performed Jean’s autopsy found brain bleeding unlike any he’d previously seen. He explained that beta-amyloid had invaded the blood vessels in her brain, a condition called CAA – cerebral amyloid angiopathy. Her initial stroke likely occurred when those vessels were inflamed and weakened by Leqembi’s amyloid-stripping action. When the clot-busting treatment, tPA, was added, they simply burst.
“It was a one-two punch,” he told Science magazine. “There’s zero doubt in my mind that this is a treatment-caused illness and death. If the patient hadn’t been on lecanemab she would be alive today.”
Such risks are by no means confined to double ApoE4 carriers like Jean and Genna. CAA is fairly common in elders with dementia-related symptoms, and it can’t be reliably spotted even with sophisticated imaging studies. As for anti-clotting drugs, they are widely prescribed to prevent stroke in seniors with common heart-rhythm abnormalities.
A still more common effect of plaque-stripping drugs is brain shrinkage or atrophy, which occurs faster on the drugs than on placebo. No one can predict the exact impact of this atrophy on patients’ future decline—but no one has argued that brain atrophy is a good thing.
In short, some unlucky patients like Jean and Genna will die long before the disease itself would have robbed their lives of meaning or pleasure. A far larger number could find their cognitive abilities fade faster rather than slower in the long run. For them the drugs may steal time rather than buying it. Others may benefit—but not by much. It’s a dreadful gamble.
Profits Galore
It’s also a business opportunity. Leqembi’s US price is $26,500 per year, according to CBS News HealthWatch. Additional charges for genetic tests, repeat MRI scans and regular monitoring to manage its risks could boost that to $82,500. One million Americans may qualify for the drug. (Medicare will cover 80% of the costs of this care; results may vary for the 50% of seniors in privately managed Medicare Advantage plans.)
This makes Leqembi “a money center for infusion centers and MRI operators.” Ditto for Eli Lilly’s Kisunla which will cost $32,000 per year and will require even more follow-up. This might explain why the bulk of the research for both drugs was managed by private for-profit enterprises backed by private equity funds.
The ethical oversight for these studies was also managed by a private company – Advarra. Advarra is a private-equity owned company that owns and operates the Institutional Review Board that approved both studies. Advarra is involved in multiple branches of the clinical research business, from study design and software to recruiting staff. In signing off on the plan not to inform the double-carriers of their extra risks, Advarra may have been grading its own homework.
Peter Selley brought Advarra to our attention investigating company studies of maternal vaccinations for RSV – Women, Pregnancy and Clinical Trials. One of the big players behind Advarra, perhaps the driving force, is Mark Barnes – a lawyer working for Harvard, Pfizer and Ropes and Gray, a law firm who defend GSK and Pfizer. Mark’s influence on our atrophying abilities to detect ‘Side Effects’ is outlined in Harmatology.
“Hope Starts Here”
For a research subject to give Informed Consent, she must first be told the possible risks and benefits of participation. Secondly, she must understand the study is not being done for her benefit, and is not “treatment.” Clearly Jean and Genna were denied the first. They may also have been denied the second, as private research centers sought to blur the distinction between research and “care.”
Jean’s last dreadful days were spent at a top-ranked university hospital—but she received her Leqembi at Great Lakes Clinical Research, a private for-profit clinical trial center on Chicago’s north side. In January 2022 Great Lakes was acquired by Flourish Research, a multi-state chain backed by NMS Capital.
Charter Research, the company that enrolled Genna Lane in Florida, is a similar private research chain. Charter’s ads in The Villages offered “free memory screens” and lab tests, along with a steady stream of free activities from luncheons to karaoke parties. Residents like Genna could easily believe Charter’s slogan that “Hope Starts Here” – not just for science, but their own worrisome symptoms. (Some West Coast clinical-research chains have gone farther, branding their recruitment centers as “Memory Clinics” according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.)
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, here’s what Flourish’s website offers potential subjects: Free memory consults. Diagnostic scans, genetic testing and other advanced services at no cost. Not to mention “one-on-one care” from board certified physicians “without having to wait months for an appointment.” Even an educated patient like Jean, who had worked as a lawyer and a psychotherapist, might come to see the clinical-trial center as the best “care option” in town—and miss the fact that its first loyalty was to Biogen, not her.
In the end, Jean (recent photo above) and Genna never had a chance for Informed Consent. The term Alzheimer’s Disease conjures up a very different image to Jean’s here. She was just like many of us. She did not have Alzheimer’s. As new Alzheimer’s drugs move from research to approval and promotion, what happened to her and Genna may become a problem for millions of the rest of us.
In the Background
DH comment from here.
Jean and Genna’s stories transform a worrying background into a truly shocking story.
Before Leqembi, there was Aduhelm – another monoclonal antibody aducanamab, which like Leqembi caused catastrophic brain bleeds. What to Know about Aduhelm. An advisory panel of academics and clinicians looked at this for FDA and recommended turning it down. FDA dissolved the panel, brought the drug back for review 6 months later and approved it. Several FDA reviewers resigned.
Consilium Scientific has run an excellent debate on the growing controversies surrounding this and other drugs for Alzheimer’s – See Is the FDA Failing the Public chaired by Peter Whitehouse.
But for anyone who reads the BMJ and likely other major journals – it’s impossible at the moment to avoid Lilly adverts offering to teach us more about biomarkers for Alzheimer’s.
On his blog Holeousia – see below for a link – Peter Scott-Gordon was the first person to draw my attention to this advert and ask – what’s going on? Peter notes that across the UK, private clinics are being set up to provide tests for this ‘treatment’. Support has come from national charities and high profile media outlets and personalities. There has been virtually no mention of harms related to this roll-out. The development of Amyloid scanners cost a whack. Is part of this recouping that cost?
Nobody, however, is explaining to the public that AD biomarkers may not have predictive value. So this massive push, adopting the word “timely” is, in effect, advocating screening for AD.
Lilly marketing involves the BMJ, the Royal Society of Medicine, the UK Dementia Tsar, and public limited companies such as ‘Scottish Brain Sciences’. See a post by Peter – Following the Sunrise.
As mentioned Peter drew my attention to the advert above. It appears in a new BMJ Hosted Section, which Peter has also flagged up. As someone who mostly just scans BMJ and get’s impressions, it has been difficult to avoid the impression lately that BMJ has recently linked up with industry to a even greater extent than it did 30 years ago when under Richard Smith it became an industry partner in the creation of Trans-Medicine.
But a Hosted Content section is pretty breathtaking. As Peter brings to our attention The BMJ’s hosted content section was “launched to give our users access to resources produced by external organisations.” The BMJ provides a contact to “corporate sales” for “external organisations” who may be interested in this opportunity to reach a general medical audience.
There is more going on. Britain’s Guideline body – NICE – also decide on whether there is enough value in a treatment to allow it to be used in the National Health Service. NICE have turned down Aduhelm and Leqembi.
On a slow news day, NICE turning treatments down becomes a news item. The BBC have featured these rejections – interviewing academic-medical people who sound very calm and reasonable when claiming this is unfortunate and hinting it’s unwarranted. These drugs are not a cure but unless we take these small steps it will take much more time to find a cure. Sounds like very good media training. Something most of us would likely pay little heed to without Johanna’s, and Peter Scott-Gordon’s posts, along with Peter Whitehouse’s and Consilium’s input.
Peter Whitehouse says
Thanks for this excellent article. Alzheimer is so much more important than Alzheimer’s. It is a magnifying lens on the pathologies of our modern culture with its neoliberal, technoscientistic, “progress” oriented, unjust world view. It is a metaphor for the metacrisis- a dementia of cultural proportions.
annie says
Why is everyone looking at me? May I have another glass of Sherry?
‘On average, patients live five to seven years after diagnosis, but some may live for ten to 15 years’ – Alzheimer’s Association
The symptoms of dementia families are being urged to look out for this Christmas
By DAILY MAIL REPORTER
Published: 00:24, 23 December 2024 | Updated: 00:56, 23 December 2024
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14220063/Families-signs-dementia-Christmas-NHS.html
Look out
It’s a pretty poor deal when ‘time-constraints’ are actioned as marketing tools.
Markku Kurkinen says
Indeed, the New York Times article (Oct. 23, 2024, mentioned by Johanna Ryan) was a shocking, very disturbing unpleasant read about the business model of drugmakers Biogen, Eisai and Lilly, with no respect to “promote, protect, and ensure the full enjoyment of human rights by persons with disabilities” as articulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in force in 186 countries since 2008.. However, the article (and Johanna) failed to mention that Leqembi (lecanemab) does not slow cognitive decline and Alzheimer dementia (AD) progression in women, or APOE4 carriers, 75% of AD patient population (1), and failed to mention that AD immunotherapy trials have violated research ethics of the Declaration of Helsinki 1974 on 2 counts, first, the drugmakers (running the drug trials) did not test anti-amyloid antibodies against the best standard of care of AD patients (donepezil or memantine) and, second, did not adequately inform trial participants of the risks associated with APOE4 status (2)..
1. Kurkinen M (2023) Lecanemab (Leqembi) is not the right drug for patients with Alz-heimer’s disease. Adv Clin Exp Med 32: 943–947
2. Daly, T, Olluri, A, Kurkinen, M (2024) Anti-amyloid treatments in Alzheimer’s disease: elegance, evidence, and ethics. Adv Clin Exp Med [published online as ahead of print on December 19, 2024]. doi:10.17219/acem/198674
Dr. David Healy says
Markku
It’s all shocking but you are making a mistake in suggesting the drugs should have been tested against the standard of care. Companies are running assays against a standard agreed with regulators and if positive this lets them get on the market. They are not doing science or attempting to inform clinical practice. They are in the business of selling drugs
David
Markku Kurkinen says
David Paragraph 33 of the World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki33 explicitly states:
The benefits, risks, burdens, and effectiveness of a new intervention must be tested against those of the best proven intervention(s) […]. Extreme care must be taken to avoid abuse of this option. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2825290 Markku
Dr. David Healy says
Markku
That applies to clinical trials run by doctors or academics to inform clinical practice. It does not apply to company assays that are constructed to allow regulators to license a company to claim their drug is an antidepressant, an antibiotic or anti-dementia agent, where regulator demand a placebo arm. Studies done to get a license are not scientific studies.
Our problem is that medicine – doctors – are not then doing independent studies of the kind Helsinki envisaged aimed at working out what place, if any, any of these drugs have in clinical care
David
Johanna says
Another voice worth listening to: Daniel Gibbs is a neurologist who discovered back in 2012 that he, like Jean and Genna, was a double carrier of the ApoE4 gene. At 62 he retired from medicine and resolved to do whatever he could to assist research into the causes and possible treatments for Alzheimer’s.
In 2017, while in a clinical trial of aducanumab (Aduhelm), Dan experienced “ARIA,” with sudden onset explosive headaches, fluctuating confusion and alexia (inability to speak). He spent several days in intensive care and another six months recovering his previous level of function.
In the years since halting his Aduhelm treatment Dan has published a memoir and collaborated on a documentary film about his journey. He has also continued to hike, sail, travel and enjoy life with his family and friends despite a slow but steady progression of his symptoms.
It’s been a remarkable Third Act that almost didn’t get to happen, thanks to ARIA and Aduhelm. Dan is amazingly free of bitterness, and even cautiously optimistic about future drug development. But he is adamant that no amount of “monitoring” or other precautions will make the use of drugs like Leqembi and Kisunla safe for double ApoE4 carriers like himself. He’s also convinced there are important non-drug methods to help people with Alzheimer’s live fully for as long as possible.
Below are links to his blog, A Tattoo On My Brain–and, for the medical wonks among us, his 2020 “case report” for the journal Alzheimer’s Dementia:
https://tattooonmybrain.com/
https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/dad2.12101
Harriet Vogt says
I know next to nothing about Alzheimer’s. Except it killed a dear friend at age 83- and his decline in the care of his wonderful partner, was gentle and loving. Unlike that poor soul, Jean, abused and trashed like a laboratory rat.
Prompted by Johanna’s rigorous and disturbing post, I’ve tried to get to superficial grips with the amyloid and tau proteins theoretical complexity – but the bottom line seems to be that nobody really knows, and the hypotheses are still very much ‘working’:
https://theconversation.com/what-causes-alzheimers-disease-what-we-know-dont-know-and-suspect-75847
Likewise, the sex differences in susceptibility, making us women twice as likely as men to develop Alzheimer’s. Seemingly we are far more ‘reactive’ (non-scientific term alert) to the APOE4 gene, which itself increases brain inflammation, than men. Apparently ‘even without dementia APOE4 is associated with significantly increased atrophy and dysfunction of the brain and that affects women much more strongly than men.’ Why – who knows? knows?https://gero.usc.edu/2016/09/19/why-does-alzheimers-disease-affect-women-more-than-men/
What is clear – and obvious – about the disease is that age is the greatest risk factor – and Pliny the Elder had a handle on this in the first century AD and Cicero even earlier:
‘Pliny the Elder notes that the senator and famous orator Valerius Messalla Corvinus forgot his own name. Cicero prudently observed that “elderly silliness … is characteristic of irresponsible old men, but not of all old men.”
What interested me even more was gerontologist, Caleb Finch’s speculation that:
‘As Roman cities grew denser, pollution increased, driving up cases of cognitive decline. In addition, Roman aristocrats used lead cooking vessels, lead water pipes and even added lead acetate into their wine to sweeten it — unwittingly poisoning themselves with the powerful neurotoxin.’https://today.usc.edu/alzheimers-in-history-did-the-ancient-greeks-and-romans-experience-dementia/
And, guess what, the disparate pieces of this puzzle are forming into a shape that’s a match with my personal biases:
Earlier-life DEPRESSION has been associated with a doubled risk of developing dementia. Recent evidence also suggests anxiety, stress and elevated cortisol (stress-hormone) levels may play a role’.
https://theconversation.com/what-causes-alzheimers-disease-what-we-know-dont-know-and-suspect-75847
I can understand the irresistible scientific fascination with the neurobiology of this disease. But, as a mere mortal, I suspect there’s a rich seam of insight to be found in exploring how brains are affected by neurotoxins – both in the outer and inner environments.
Dr. David Healy says
Inner environments being the neurotoxins we put in our mouths or inject?
D
Harriet Vogt says
Precisely.
Is it significant that twice as many women as men are prescribed antidepressants- one might wonder?
Dr. David Healy says
Cognitive decline which is ever more likely to lead to a dementia diagnosis can be linked to alcohol and nicotine intake and nobody has any problems making this link. But there is no reason to think that the consumption of other chemicals besides these two is going to be any less of a problem.
Most stuff that turns up on google stresses that dementia and its burden is going to increase hugely in the next 20 years but this is put down to aging. You have to look hard to find studies saying that actually in the developed world its incidence – the number of new cases each year is falling – and falling most in men – whose alcohol and nicotine consumption is falling relative to women and as you say ADs but not just ADs – this has to be more a case of the number of meds people are on rather than any particular group being a big problem
D
Harriet Vogt says
Bingo,
I know this study only relates to the Spanish population, but…
‘Conclusion: Polypharmacy has a prevalence of 23.2%, with women accounting for 28.1% and men 17.2% of the total. Knowledge of positive and negative predictors of polypharmacy have important implications for public health efforts to develop or improve health guidelines and strategies for promoting the proper use of medication, particularly in the elderly population by sex.’
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pharmacology/articles/10.3389/fphar.2023.1189644/full
chris says
Grace E Jackson’s book Drug induced Dementia a perfect crime
Chapter 4 Antidepressants
She talks about the neurogenesis theory of depression
pg 97
Stress causes high cortisol and depression.
High cortisol causes hippocampus atrophy.
Therefore, hippocampus atrophy causes depression.
She see’s this as an error in reasoning known as the fallacy of joint effects.
I think it’s the whole lot and stress, anxiety, depression presented to a GP begets the drugs. She goes on to show ‘a four week study involving tree shrews exposure to fluoxetine resulted in the shrinkage of the hippocampus’.
Dr. David Healy says
The human body is not made to take drugs chronically – any drugs. Most of the serotonin or dopamine in us is in out bodies not our brains – its primarily good company marketing that gets us looking at brains for what these drugs do.
D
annie says
When will the ‘Brain’, get the ‘push’
The common belief that depression is tied to serotonin levels in the brain is a myth, argues British psychiatrist David Healy in a controversial editorial published Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ.
2015
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-serotonin-levels-depression-link-is-a-marketing-myth-psychiatrist-claims/
“The marketing departments of companies trying to sell these drugs came up with the idea that what the drugs (SSRIs) do is correct lowered serotonin,” Healy told me. “The was the kind of idea that worked tremendously well with a lot of doctors, and patients. It seemed to provide a reason to give the pill but it was completely wrong. It was simply a marketing idea.”
Serotonin and depression
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1771
Rapid responses
https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h1771/rapid-responses
‘ I feel embarrassed that I, like most GPs have been persuaded that I should encourage patients to take medications for which the benefits are so poorly shown. How is it that this information is only becoming available after the SSRI patents have expired?’
‘It is time that psychiatrists stop relying on an archaic manual and start searching for biological markers of mental disorders. A good place to start at, in my opinion, is the gastrointestinal tract, where 95% of serotonin originates, and all the nutritional building blocks of all neurotransmitters are absorbed.’
‘Little wonder, then, that those who have reason to be embarrassed are now throwing the book at Dr. Healy for stating the obvious.’
https://davidhealy.org/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-serotonin/
So Long and Thanks for all the Serotonin
ANON says
Cognitive decline which is ever more likely to lead to a dementia is induced by medications and procedures.
What the heck do they put in the dyes when they do scans?
I experienced myself firsthand how a concoction of medicines can induce brain fog.
From cradle to grave, we are being jabbed and being medicated for every disorder.
Since the MRNA jabs, many people worldwide have passed away not knowing that the jabs dictated their unfortunate fate.
Many disorders have also been attributed from the MRNA jabs. People can’t make the correlation because it takes some time for disease to manifest or incubate.
For those who did not receive the jab sadly, you are not bullet proof from the MRNA being diffused into your blood stream.
Thanks to vaccine shedding you can have the MRNA passed onto you despite all the hype informing the unvaccinated this this is not possible. The best immunity against the Covid 19 is natural immunity although I am still hearing nonsense being muttered out in the community.
Has SCIENCE outsmarted us?
We have been numbed to what is really going on and have had to rely less on our intuition and innate intellect.
When will man ever learn that playing God is going to come with a high price to pay?
Already we are witnessing the perils of a world in crisis.
Some people are totally oblivious to how their mental health is impacting others, but do they really care?
ANON says
How can the poor patient give consent when they are on a long list of medications?
The issue with Western Medicine is they expect you to comply especially, if you are in any form of institution.
It’s like when a child enters school. To make things easier for the teaching staff they placate a lot of children with medications.
This is the process that many go through just to appease the ‘status quo’ or standards of how places are managed. Do all medicines really improve the learning abilities of children once they are medicated?
How many people have been medicated and have had their natural gifts taken away from them because the medications prescribed, adversely impacted or changed their thought processes.
We never seem to look into what makes people aggressive or what triggers people to do what they do.
We are quick to take medication but not get down to the real heart of the matters.
We do not know the long-term side effects.
We do not know if further harm is induced by the medicines that are prescribed.
We just take everything that professionals and BIG PHARMA say as Gospel.
How can many patients give CONSENT when they are too heavily medicated?
Annie, I totally AGREE with you in regard to the following:
‘It is time that psychiatrists stop relying on an archaic manual and start searching for biological markers of mental disorders.
Yes, we have to appreciate that every person is unique, and we do not have all the information or knowledge in regard to how many medicines adversely impact the mind. Mental disorders are created by medications, procedures and usually hostile environments or unpleasant behaviors of people.
For someone who has experienced the harms of Western medicine, I believe we deserve to be heard and respected.
ANON says
Interesting read re: Memory Loss and Cognitive Decline in Seniors after Surgery
https://vanduyncenter.com/memory-loss-and-cognitive-decline-in-seniors-after-surgery/