Jackie from Arizona left a comment on my last post. The comment was about a post she thought I had made regarding the use of the drug Abilify on children.
Jackie, I see that your comment was clearly heart-felt and I empathize with your situation. However, I can't find any post on the four blogs that I contribute to that mentions Abilify. I can only guess that you got to my post from a link on another blog.
I would never criticize desperate parents for the actions they take to handle a situation with their kids. I do criticize doctors and psychiatrists who, without seeking less harmful alternatives, prescribe drugs that are not approved for kids and that have dangerous side effect. (See this data on Abilify.)
Parents trust health care professionals to be advising them correctly and honestly. It is not the parents fault when a health care professional is poorly trained and ignorant of alternatives to dangerous treatments, yet pretends to know what he or she is talking about when prescribing potentially lethal drugs.
The parents place their trust in the doctor and all too often in these days of assembly line medicine, the parents are betrayed when the doctor scribbles a quick prescription for the latest and greatest drug the pharmaceutical rep just told him about.
There are alternative treatments and even if the child needs a calming drug in an emergency there are older and safer alternatives, drugs that are out of patent but that have a 30 or 40 year history of safe use with minimal side-effects. Trouble is, such drugs are out of patent and so are not pushed in the face of doctors by pharmaceutical companies hungry for profits.
So, Jackie, I am sad that you gave your child Abilify, but I understand that you were doing what you thought was best for your son based on what you were told by the doctors.
A culture is only as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamed by artists. — Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard