Which medical or psychiatric conditions are made up or exaggerated to sell pills?

I don’t have it, but it seems that restless leg syndrome is bogus.

@Brian1946 My aunt has restless leg syndrome and when she doesn’t take the medication she can’t sleep because her legs twitch or jerk all the time.

@talljasperman “I pay $1200 a month”

Are you actually paying anyone any money? That sounds unlikely to me.

@dappled_leaves I’m a Canadian, Albertian on Aish (assured income for serverly handicapped ) as long as I am on it my pills and injections are covered. Would prefer the money from my pills to go to my food budget. I am restricted in working while on it.

@talljasperman That’s what I thought. Thanks.

ADHD for sure. When my child started school they immediately said he had ADHD and then the doctor told us he didn’t really know how the drugs worked but that he needed them. We never put him on medication and he learned how to stay in his seat all by himself. That was the whole reason the teacher started the problem.

@talljasperman I’m going to guess that money not given for medication would never simply be reallocated toward food. Has your food budget been changed since you were prescribed the medication?

@dappled_leaves I moved out on my own and am learning how to cook for myself and I am still ordering out and not getting food poisoning. The cost of meat is going up. I just had McDonald’s and milk delivered. For 30 bucks because I am sick. Any way we are off topic. My cell phone data is $300 month. $80 for the phone and $220 for data and cable.

@talljasperman My point is only that being able to get your medication is not taking away from anything else in your life. This is a good thing.

I think my doctor’s over-prescribe for my condition, so I don’t take as much anti-thyroid medication as they tell me. I think my system works better when my numbers look slightly elevated to them, but they panic and tell me I should be having my thyroid burnt out with radio active iodine. Talk about using a sledge hammer to push in a thumb tack. My pills aren’t very expensive here. I have a small co-pay and they last me a long time because I only take them when I feel symptoms or when I have a blood test coming up. I haven’t taken any in weeks now, but because the doctor made me take so much this last round I was slightly elevated, I can’t get my thyroid to kick in again and I’m pissed because I feel horrible.

I think cholesterol medication is a red herring in many cases. I also think people shouldn’t get so fat or eat such crap that they get type 2 diabetes so that seems so preventable. I don’t understand all this sleep apnia stuff, but perhaps that goes hand in hand with obesity, but everyone seems to be on one of those machines now.

@majorrich: I think ADHD is real but probably over-diagnosed, due to parents giving their kids sugary drinks and sugary cereal which makes the kids hyper. IMHO they should try avoiding those foods and then see how the kid does, before putting him on medication.

There is little correlation with sugar and hyperactivity.

@cazzie However, there is a correlation between childhood and hyperactivity. ;)

Absolutely. I work with a dozen or so every week.

According to my therapist. He (6 at the time) was being an exuberant boy. Acting like an exuberant boy. lol

My son was uncontrollable at school until he started on adrenaline reuptake inhibitors. He was literally flipping tables. He finally got help after his diagnosis, but it took a long time for the school and social workers and neighbours to stop pointing fingers at me for being the foreign mother who didn’t know a damn thing about raising a child and surely stunted his communication skills by speaking to him only in English, therefore, of course he was going to be frustrated and violent. Wrong. Diagnosis. Medication. Now at the top of his class academically, but bored and it is still a fight to get him to do the work, but it is a different type of fight. He doesn’t fit in socially at all. He doesn’t feel Norwegian, even though he was born here. I did break him and set him up for failure in so many ways, but I hope he’ll say I tried. I have no future here, but I hope he finds one.

@talljasperman

Let me be frank here – from what I understand you’re already considerably overweight. Do you really need another $1,200 every month to spend on fast and delivery food? In addition to what you already have. $1,200 is really more than any single person needs for food in a month.

And yes, there are certainly some conditions that are over-diagnosed. Not made up, but over-diagnosed for sure. Paranoid schizophrenia isn’t really one of them. It’s a pretty serious mental illness that needs to be treated. And it’s not a diagnosis that doctors make easily or lightly. You may want to consider the possibility that maybe your doctor is on to something.

@majorrich

Unfortunately plain old behavior modification is not really in fashion these days so some teachers (as well as doctors) are too quick to prescribe pills where plain old fashioned effort can yield the same results.

But true ADHD is a neurological condition and if you ever encountered a child who truly had it, you wouldn’t doubt it.

As a teacher, I’ve come across it enough to realize how these children live in constant frustration at not being able to focus and learn like average kids. They want to. But no matter how hard they try, they just can’t.

When my nephew was quite young my sister also had to deal with a teacher insisting he needed to be put on medication and she asked my advice.

I told her he wasn’t even nearly eligible. His main problem was that he could learn just fine if it was something he was interested in but if not, then it was a bust.

When he was only five he wanted to learn how to play chess. He loved games of any type. Obviously chess has a lot more complexity than checkers and one needs to be able to remember the allowed moves for each separate piece.

Within a month or so of my teaching him, he was playing regular games with no difficulty.

ADHD is not something a kid can turn on and off at will. They have the ability to focus or they don’t. Obviously a kid who can play chess at five can focus and concentrate just fine. So, it’s just a matter of making it in the kids own best interest to apply the same skill to schoolwork, and that’s where a lot of teachers opt to put kids on medication rather than dealing with their boredom with schoolwork :)

If a child is misdiagnosed then those medications just mess up their whole systems unnecessarily. It’s a good thing you knew your son well enough to resist.

But for kids who do truly have ADHD the right meds can make all the difference in the world and lift them out of a constant downward spiral.

Going back to the original question – diagnoses and/or over-prescribed medications:

1. Anxiety (hello, we all have that on a spectrum – not everyone needs valium or klonopin)

2. “Low-T” or “ED” (Erectile Dysfunction) – Pfizer and their ilk have made HEAPS of money on aging baby-boomers.

3. Statins (medications to lower cholesterol) ..these are under debate in the medical community as being potentially useless..

4. Hypertension. Many, many healthy people have “white coat syndrome” and get high readings at times. Blood Pressure can vary widely. Most anyone you know on a “water pill” (i.e. chlorthalidone, Thalitone) does not truly have high blood pressure. Doctors are pressured by big Pharma to prescribe the latest flavor of ACE inhibitor or other BP med du jour all the time. Be wary…be very, very wary. There are lots of non-medicinal ways to lower blood pressure.

5. Last, but far from least, there are lots of folks out there who complain of “chronic pain” when what they have is an opioid dependency or addiction. This is old as time. Most people in the medical profession see a bunch of these types with every story in the book. They “doctor shop” and/or try every hospital in a wide radius complaining of random “back pain” or something similar.

I’m not saying there aren’t people with genuine intractable pain (i.e. Fibromylagia), I’m just saying that pain medications are really over-prescribed.