Chapter 146: The Press’s Failure to Report Fallout From Halcion/Triazoalam Misuse by Dentists for Oral Sedation or Facts About Brain Injury

This blog addresses the adverse effects of the sleeping pill, Halcion/Triazolam, as it is being fraudulently promoted and recklessly abused now by dentists, along with the devastating effect it has had on my daughter after she suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Sophie has now been incarcerated on a hospital psyche ward since January 14th.
For 39 days she has not been allowed sunlight or a breath of fresh air. She has committed no crime, and yet the dental board that waived special licensing its own rules required dentists to obtain before using even 1/2 the amount of Halcion she was prescribed has no penalties imposed upon it, nor has the dentist paid any price whatsoever so far.

Penn State’s Dr. Anthony Kales, in an interview with 60 Minutes in 1991, said this about Halcion: “The scientific evidence is overwhelming; this is a very, very dangerous drug.”

But the FDA committee composed of mostly conflicted interested individuals, said basically, “that’s OK, we’ll just lower the dose a bit.”

Then a decade later, a dentist named Silverman and an NIH scientist named Dionne said, in effect, “All this talk about Halcion is just media hype; it’s not dangerous; let’s forget all that nonsense and promote it as the ideal dental sedative,” with Silverman, I suspect getting help from the manufacturer’s PR personnel, producing one of the slickest promotional packages anyone’s ever seen, centered around the concept of “sleep dentistry.”

So I know about several casualties of this so-called sleep dentistry besides my daughter’s. In the most severe incident, John Coleman went to his dentist for “sleep dentistry” and never woke up.

To make matters worse, the brain injury (TBI) that preceded the overdosing of my daughter has been denied by those who have taken control of Sophie’s life, and she has not only been denied her freedom, stripped of basic human rights, but she has also been denied by Dare County Social Services and the doctors they control, her right to the proper medical evaluation and treatment.

She has also been denied the right to see her own mother. You see, I am “dangerous,” “negligent,” according to DSS, because I followed orders of doctors who are not bought by or ruled by the pharmaceutical industry, who have the sense to recognize the serious adverse effects of psychoactive drugs and the ability to read the facts about brain injury, ie that CT Scans do not detect most brain damage, the kind that can cause the most severe psychiatric and behavioral symptoms, and that there IS no FDA-approved pharmacological treatment for brain injury.

But facts don’t matter to government agencies like our Department of Social Services. The government, in general, often doesn’t seem to factor in facts in its decision-making process.
So those who do and make those who don’t look bad, end up being punished for basing their actions on facts.

With DSS in charge, Sophie is being forced-drugged with drugs KNOWN to cause further brain damage, even though the cause of her current symptoms stems back to brain damage and prescription drug overdose.

And yet NOT ONE news source will tell this story or even discuss this issue as it relates to our seriously broken mental health system, while coverage of civil rights violations all over the world continues daily.

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. ”
–Edward R. Murrow

Chapter 145: Robbing the Brain-Damaged of Proper Diagnosis and Treatment

Aside from those who promote and use legal drugs that rob the brain, other brain robbers are the doctors and government agencies and insurance companies that refuse to properly diagnose and treat brain injury.

I have found much evidence that supports the need to certainly at least properly rule out brain damage (with neuropsychological testing) BEFORE treating symptoms with drugs.

Below is some of the evidence and sources I’ve found, in addition to verbal confirmation I’ve gotten from sources like Brain Injury Associations.

Patients who have had a TBI are more vulnerable to adverse effects of medication and are less likely to show evidence of benefit. Symptoms will often improve spontaneously. Furthermore, there may not be an indication for the symptom that the drug is being used for. It is prudent to continue drug treatment of behavioral, cognitive, and psychiatric symptoms after TBI only if there is good evidence that the patient is benefiting.
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/trauma-and-violence/content/article/10168/1534138

Many drugs given to brain injured persons have undesirable cognitive side effects and cause more harm than good. Certain antiseizure medications cause attention and memory problems, and choice of medication often does not reflect this awareness. Minor tranquilizers (such as Valium) which may calm anxious or tense persons without brain damage, may cause memory problems, poor judgment, and emotional control problems in head injured persons. Major tranquilizers, which organize psychotic thinking and calms agitated behavior in schizophrenics, can have the opposite effect after brain damage. The dampening of the neurotransmitter systems (which helps the schizophrenic) after brain injury decreases cortical functioning, worsens cognitive deficits, leads to more confusion and disorganization, and thus poorer thinking and increased agitation.

http://www.getrealresults.com/tenmyths.html
DEBUNKING TEN MYTHS OF “RECOVERY”

~from CH2 “The Nature of Head Injury” by Thomas Kay, Ph.D. and Muriel Lezak, Ph.D., the book is entitled “Traumatic Brain Injury and Vocational Rehabilitation”, Published by The Research and Training Center, University of Wisconsin-Stout.

http://gordonjohnson.com/
http://www.brainindex.com/
The lawyer on the sites above seems very knowledgeable and he also seems to truly care about helping. His short videos certainly debunk the myths Dare County Department of Social Services and its lawyers, including my daughter’s so-called advocate attorney, clung to as they worked hard to deny her diagnoses of brain damage and deny her civil rights.

They continue to deny her civil rights and her right to proper diagnosis and treatment, based on pure lies. And they are getting away with it just as some dentists are getting away with poisoning patients with high doses of Halcion.

In nearly 85 percent of the patients that I see, the CT Scan or MRI (these are very expensive machines that take a picture of the brain) results are “negative”—in other words, normal. People can have significant head injuries and still not have a positive finding on these tests.

Neuropsychological testing is probably one of the best vehicles for diagnosing head injury. It’s between 90 and 95 percent correct in accurately diagnosing someone who has a head injury. Right now, it is the best technique available. But not everyone has access to a neuropsychologist.

TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY SURVIVAL GUIDE
By Dr. Glen Johnson, Clinical Neuropsychologist

5123 North Royal Drive || Traverse City, MI 49684
Phone: 231-929-7358 || Email: debglen@yahoo.com
Website http://www.tbiguide.com/

Chapter 141: Recap – Effects of Halcion/triazolam on me and my daughter

This post is an ongoing investigation and report about the effects of the off-label use of Halcion/triazolam (used as a dental sedative). I am very tied up right now trying to get help defending my daughter’s rights and TRYING to protect her from forced drugging, so I am not doing any new research on this off-label use and the adverse effects of Halcion until I have more time.

However, if you check chapter 125 at http://www.brainrobber.com (october 2010) you will find a topic index to info on just about anything ever reported on Halcion – and how its promotion for the off-label use as a dental sedative is based on fraud and distortion.

Below is a recap of what the drug did to my daughter in response to a comment posted on the blog. More research will be posted later. I understand the University of Washington will be doing more studies on this off-label use, perhaps attempting to justify its use as a dental sedative, though at lower doses than what my daughter and John Coleman rec’d. Coleman was killed by his dentist in 2007 after she/he dosed him with 2 mg of Halcion — AFTER two promoters, Goodchild and Donaldson published a paper in “General Dentistry” saying it wouldn’t be dangerous to use that much for long appointments — basing this claim on a totally bogus citation. You’ll find details by going to Chapter 125 and looking for posts on the safety hoax.

Here’s my response to the commentator’s question about the effects of Halcion on me and my daughter – these are just the most obvious and disturbing effects she suffered:

severe insomnia, followed by severe anorexia, followed by agitation and irritability, followed by delusions. Made much worse when Trazodone was added to help with the insomnia — then severe delusions, hallucinations and very very bizarre behavior followed, so bizarre, I was bewildered. She was, for some time, in a state of what resembled protracted benzodiazepine withdrawal, alleviated by vitamins (esp nadh and C), sleep, low stress, no toxic exposures, and diet therapy — exacerbated any time she took a psychoactive drug. With these drugs, she stops eating and sleeping again and gets very agitated initially. It takes weeks to get over relapses, which is consistent with being in a state of protracted benzodiazepine withdrawal, a state Halcion/triazolam is KNOWN to trigger. The sensitivity to drugs is also an earmark of brain damage.

the above was the effect on my daughter.

The effect on me, watching all of this destruction to my daughter’s life, has been devastating beyond words. To have Dare County Dept of Social Services interfere during a relapse and decide she is schizo and needs to be on drug therapy — forcing her into a mental hospital with deputies and handcuffs (with her scared and traumatized) and drugging her, despite all the information I provided, makes me feel like we are living in Nazi Germany. DSS is preventing me from contacting her doctors about the brain injury and the Halcion overdose and adverse reactions to several drugs since. This situation has been, of course, devastating for me. I have stopped eating and sleeping normally from the severe stress and disbelief of the cruel actions of DSS. DSS will not allow me to visit my daughter — they say I am dangerous – apparently because I chose NOT to force her into therapy based on drugging (this decision based on extensive research, including that by Grace Jackson, Peter Breggin, Robert Whitaker, Joanna Moncrieff and others) and two diagnosis by reputable psychiatrists who say she has brain damage, and one saying drugs will likely worsen her condition. One has a nephew who returned home from Iraq with brain damage and developed psychosis after a doctor prescribed Zoloft. Eyery single adverse reaction my daughter has had to drugs taken since her brain injury, reactions that mimic “mental illness,” are noted on the drugs’ labels and in the literature on their adverse reactions. There is NO mystery about what has happened to her, and the reports on psychiatric effects from Halcion are overwhelming — more rec’d by FDA than for any other drug in its class. And yet right now the hospital is drugging her with another drug in the benzo class, and the way it often works is that when a patient has an adverse reaction to a drug that causes psychiatric effects, they are drugged with even more psychoactive drugs, rather than given the opportunity to recover from the first reaction (which can take weeks/months – even years with some benzo reactions).

DSS apparently wants my daughter on drugs for life.

My daughter expressed her wishes in writing before this violation of her Civil Rights occurred. she does not want DSS involved in her life. She does not want to take antipsychotic drugs, and there have been Supreme Court decisions protecting the right of individuals to reject drug treatments that are not proven to be safe and effective or more effective than alternatives.

No one can prove that antipsychotics are safe or are more effective than other treatments. In fact, there is substantial evidence showing that those who are not drugged have a better chance at long-term recovery from psychosis that those who are drugged.

Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that drugging a brain-damaged person can be very dangerous, and that brain damage, if even a possibility, certainly needs to be acknowledged and ruled out before drugs are used in non-emergency situations.