Posted by med_empowered on August 1, 2005, at 2:39:31
In reply to Re: do barbiturates have ANY benefits? » rjlockhart98, posted by Declan on July 31, 2005, at 23:35:17
The thing about barbiturates is that...while I agree that there are/were problems with them, they weren't *that* bad. I mean, for a long time phsyicians understood that they had addictive potential, but they also understood that alot of the hardcore addicts became addicted (and stayed addicted) b/c they were allowed to by calluos, uncaring, unprofessional doctors. The biggest advantage of benzos is that they don't usually kill people in overdose. If you read the medical literature from the 1960s-70s, doctors then really weren't all that conviced that they were much better than the barbiturates....early research with Librium pointed to the possibility of tolerance and addiction and barbiturate-like withdrawals in some cases, so docs kind of looked at them as over-priced, over-hyped new drugs. That's one reason barbiturates were still being RX'd well into the 1970s. When you think about it, a lot of the problems associated with the barbiturate treatments of the past had more to do with bad medical practice, poor monitoring, and bad patient selection than it did with any failing of the medications themselves. I mean, look at Dexamyl; yes, it was addictive, and some people had serious problems with it. But many, many more people got FAST, EFFECTIVE, SAFE relief from depression and anxiety--what anti-depressant on the market today can claim to relieve symptoms 30minutes after you take your first dose? Plus, psychiatry has a tendency to embrace new, expensive treatments and villainize old ones...look at what happened when Prozac hit the scene; suddenly there was a new, effective drug that was "superior" to the inexpensive stand-bys of the past. Turns out...Prozac isn't so great after all, and the hype was largely unsupported by any sort of evidence. Same thing with the atypical antipsychotics. Suddenly, psychiatrists are admitting that Haldol, Thorazine, etc. do cause serious problems and tend to "flatten" out patients (its taken them an AWFULLY long time to admit publicly what has been OBVIOUS to just about anyone for a long, long time). But...fast forward a few years, and it turns out: atypical antipsychotics cause obesity and diabetes; old drugs were over-prescribed, so low-dose haldol, for instance, might be just as good as Zyprexa; also, atypicals cause problems you didn't usually see with the old-school meds, like inducing mania. And yet...these expensive meds are being RX'd for everything from schizophrenia and psychotic disorders to bipolar disorder (acute problems and maintenance), control of anger and aggression, insomnia, and even anxiety. Its ridiculous.
poster:med_empowered
thread:536220
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