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31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
They still do shock treatment?, February 25, 2009
This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)
If you've ever wondered how generations of medical authority could have been so wrong about practices such as bleeding, consider shock treatment or ECT.
The author describes in fascinating detail the "30 year comeback" of electroshock.
I am honored to be mentioned as having attempted to expose the brain damage and amnesia at the beginning of the "PR era." I am a neurologist appalled by the practice of inducing convulsions. Convulsions are a catastrophe doctors should be dedicated to preventing.
Three decades later there is incontrovertible evidence that shock treatments always cause memory loss, sometimes cause seizures and not infrequently cause death.
The story of how psychiatry has defended the indefensible is told with awesome scholarship and remarkable wit by one of it's most indomitable critics.
This book is the truth about ECT. You won't find it anywhere else.
John Friedberg, MD
Board Certified Neurologist
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23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Daring to take the Business of Electroshock by the Prods., February 14, 2009
This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)
Linda Andre had been blessed. With an I. Q. measured at 156, a powerful work ethic, a drive to succeed, a musician's ear and artist's eye, she sailed through her academic career to the heights of scholarship and was beginning a brilliant career as a writer and photographer when, at 25, the assault happened, like a horrific mugging and beating. Permanently brain damaged by the assault, her I. Q. had been chopped down to 118. Gone also was her gift for photography. Perhaps worse of all was the complete erasure of five years of her memory, one-fifth of her lifetime, including all her prestigious academic training, as if she'd never lived those lost years.
Any other mugging would have thrown the perpetrators into jail for years and cost them millions in civil penalties. But this was a legal mugging. And the perpetrators even made $20,000 for destroying much of Ms. Andre's life. They were, after all, licensed doctors of medicine and, instead of using a baseball bat on her head (which would have been kinder), they sent up to 200 volts of electricity into her brain with their electro convulsive "therapy" machine.
Why would doctors, of all people, inflict such physical and emotional harm to another? Ms. Andre, having no memory of the events leading up to her assault, can only go by what other people have told her and the existing documentation. So she spends most of her affecting and exhaustively researched book looking for the answer then joining and later becoming a leading voice in the struggle against ECT machines and other instruments of this medical holocaust which claims thousands of victims each year, robbing them of their day-to-day abilities to function and up to decades of memory.
Here Ms. Andre documents the countless efforts to ask the questions and tell the mental patient's stories through various media only to learn that even the most trusted outlets have their own visions of what the answers are, regardless of the facts put in front of them. Few readers of this book will be able to sit complacently in front of their TVs afterwards, just as none of us should ever sheepishly allow any "expert" with certain conflicts of interest to lead us to ruin.
It is also a pleasure to read the facts behind ECT rather than the gushing accolades of Carrie Fisher (who receives regular shocks and has lost, so far, 4 months of her life-memories) and of Kitty Dukakas (who, along with lost memories, must constantly write notes to herself before her damaged short-term memory loses the information).
My deepest hope is that medical school students will read Ms. Andre's book, take it to heart and dare to ask those questions.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
First do no harm. No. Strike that. First do a survey, March 24, 2009
This review is from: Doctors of Deception: What They Don't Want You to Know About Shock Treatment (Hardcover)
Earlier this year, Marcia Angell, writing in The New York Review of Books, lamented, "It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." Angell's review laid out the many ways in which the medical field, particularly psychiatry, has allowed itself to be thoroughly corrupted by its extensive ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
In her compelling new book, Doctors of Deception, Linda Andre demonstrates that this corruption extends to the big business of shock treatment (also known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)). For decades a small group of psychiatrists, many with financial interests in shock machine manufacturers, has controlled the principal source of funds for ECT research, the National Institute of Mental Health, thereby insuring that studies which could demonstrate the extent of shock's devastating memory, attention and learning effects were never undertaken.
Those same gatekeepers wrote the American Psychiatric Association (APA) task force reports on electroconvulsive therapy so that negative findings regarding shock would never reach a broader audience. The reports were created to serve as public relations documents and psychiatrists have cited them regularly before federal and state governmental bodies as proof that shock is safe and effective in the absence of any real proof that it is.
Andre shows us how psychiatrists have for decades buried evidence, falsified reports, and employed a "new and improved" public relations mantra to sell a brain damaging procedure. To this day the shock sales pitch dominates media coverage of ECT. Shock, we are told, is effective and prevents suicide, and new techniques - oxygenation, anesthesia, less electricity, and different electrode placements - make the "new" shock safe. The fact that there is not a shred of medical evidence that any of this is true - and much to prove it false - has not prevented the message from being repeated endlessly.
Fraud and criminality within the psychiatric drug industry is so egregious that it can no longer be overlooked and well respected voices like Angell are beginning to be heard. Prior to Andre's book, however, there was a dearth of information about the covert machinations of the shock industry. Doctors of Deception goes a long way towards remedying that scarcity, while giving those who care about informed consent and human rights in the mental health field a powerful weapon with which to battle the Doctors of Deception.
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