A recent report from the Associated Press is scaring the bejesus out of many iPod users. It seems that digital virus is not something you can only get by downloading porn movies or visiting shady sites. Your gadget may already be carrying a virus even before you open the sealed package.
A whole new phenomenon, no doubt. But all this virus talk reminded me of the popular belief that computer viruses are created by geeks and nerds who have nothing better to do. You know, as though computer viruses are actually juvenile pranks. But those who dare to look beyond mindless stereotyping have other theories. Some have been saying as early as five years ago that big businesses hired computer geniuses to create the damaging programs. Why? So that these businesses could profit from the antidotes otherwise known as anti-virus programs.
The theory is as haunting as it is surreal. So surreal it’s almost like a plot from a movie. Remember Doug Ray Scott in Mission Impossible 2? He wanted to steal both a virus and the antidote, release the virus on the human population then reap the profits by selling the only antidote there was.
The thing is, if we consider how many illnesses have been discovered during the past century, the plot becomes less fictitious. Consider the so-called psychological disorders said to be triggered by some chemical imbalance in the brain. There are drugs for bipolar disorder, depression and every kind of psychiatric label. There’s Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Luvox, Effexor, Serzone, Anafranil, Fenfluramine, Fen-phen, Redux, Ritalin and other mind-altering medication for every condition that has been discovered.
The question, of course, is whether these are really cases of discovered conditions or invented labels. In “A Dose of Sanity: Mind, Medicine, and Misdiagnosis,” author Sydney Walker, a practicing psychiatrist and neurologist, wrote about patients who had been misdiagnosed with one mental condition or another and given drugs by their own doctors. Because the drug prescriptions were based on misdiagnoses, naturally, the patients were not cured. The really interesting thing is that many of these patients were exhibiting behavioral problems that had physiological, rather than, psychological causes. And when I use the word physiological, I don’t mean some chemical imbalance in the brain but things like thyroid dysfunction or some white matter in the brain as a result of multiple sclerosis.
And yet, so many people leave their doctors’ clinics with prescriptions for mind-altering drugs. The father who’s feeling low is given antidepressants when what he really needs is to get rid of work-related anxiety. Will antidepressants help in such a situation or will it make matters worse?
The trouble with so many doctors is how fast they think they solve their patients’ problems by scribbling on their prescription pads. I am a living example of such a culture. When I was in my twenties, I had this non-stop bleeding and everyone said my menstrual cycle was changing.
Then, my parents finally panicked and brought me to doctors. Lots of doctors. The first three gynecologists found nothing after several ultrasound tests. And yet–and yet–they were so sure that it was a case of hormonal imbalance and they started feeding me with birth control pills (hormones). Of course, I didn’t get well. I was getting blood transfusions every few months but the bleeding just went on and on. The gynecologists enlisted the help of an endocrinologist and a hematologist and each specialist gave me a different drug cocktail. And I just went on bleeding–for a year and a half. It came to a point when the gynecologist advised total hysterectomy to stop the bleeding once and for all. What a solution and no one was even sure what the problem was! Of course I said, no way.
Then, my father brought me to a fifth gynecologist. He advised surgery because he was sure there was a “growth” that wasn’t showing up in the sonograms. He was right. There were two “growths”– benign it turned out later–and one was five centimeters in diameter. Two months after the surgery, I was back to normal. Four years later, I gave birth to my first child.
The obvious question is why are doctors too quick with writing prescriptions despite unclear diagnosis? The question is directly related with “Why are so-called medical scientists too sure that chemical imbalances in the brain are the true cause of behavioral problems?”
We now go back to the computer virus and the question of who creates them and what the heck for. We simply translate the scenario and ask who benefits most from the invention of so many labels dubbed as psychiatric conditions. When you realize the answer to that question, you will no longer wonder why doctors are so quick at prescribing drugs to patients even when they are not sure what the patients suffer from.
We live in an age when medical research is too often funded by drug companies. This is not my personal theory. Go ahead and do your own reading. Doctors and medical scientists who have retained some semblance of respectability are saying and exhorting the public to ask first who funded a study before accepting its conclusions. There is a paper entitled “Is continuing medical education a drug-promotion tool?” that extends the problem even farther as it examines the industry practice whereby continuing medical education receives unrestricted funding from drug companies.
It is so easy for doctors to prescribe Prozac or Xanax or whatever mind-altering drugs sold by the manufacturer that generously pays for their junkets, their expensive dinners or their Rolex watches. It is also an age when far too many doctors have become unofficial spokespersons, ambassadors and marketers of drug companies. The corruption has become so pervasive that the American Medical Association has issued guidelines relative to the propriety of accepting gifts from drug companies. I have not heard of any parallel guidelines from the Philippine Medical Association.
So, if you ever get an anxiety attack or suffer from depression, consider first whether there is anything in your physical environment that can be altered before deciding to buy the drug that your doctor has prescribed. Remember that chemical imbalance cannot be seen nor heard nor touched, and that its direct relation to any condition or behavior is a theory that has not been proven. Remember too that these drugs can alter your mind in the wrong way irrevocably.
You don’t really want to take drugs based on some doctor’s guesswork, do you?
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