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“All Medicines Are Poisons” Paracelsus’s Perspective

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The Decapitation of Care is a short text that takes issue with the current hegemonic thought that has elevated health technology to a position of being the new route to salvation. The starting point is that the thoughtless employment of this technology is harming people — it has started to shorten their life expectancy and has undermined healthcare and the doctor-patient relationship. David Healy, therefore, invites us to “stop doing” in a protocolized and standardized way, and stop to think.

The Zyprexa Papers

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The Zyprexa Papers has two interlocking parts. One centers on a set of documents relating to Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa (olanzapine), a company cash cow, which had been made available under a secrecy order to lawyers acting for hundreds of people injured by Zyprexa. The other centres on Bill Bigley, a man enmeshed in the Alaskan mental health system since the early 1980s with over 70 admissions.

If you start reading, be warned, all of your defences will be stripped away. If you think what happens to Bill Bigley could only happen in some out of way place, like Anchorage, think again… It takes a certain amount of time and distance to write a book as good as this. It also takes a certain amount of nerve. It is likely that no conventional publisher would take a risk on publishing this.  All the more reason to buy The Zyprexa Papers.

The Decapitation of HealthCare: Review

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by John Dan Stone, Age of Autism, UK Editor A welcome for David Healy’s new, short polemical volume The Decapitation of Care. Healy as ever likes to express himself in terms of historical theatre — the comparison with oppressive political situations of past as well as the roots of this present oppressive situation in the […]

Manifesto As Method: Review

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By Pamela Stavropoulos Author: Living under Liberalism Significantly, psychiatrist and cultural critic David Healy characterises his most recent publication, A Short History of the Rise and Fall of Healthcare as ‘the Health care Manifesto’. Defined as ‘a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer’ a manifesto is generally both a […]

Health Care or Health Services?

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David Healy is a Professor of Psychiatry at Bangor University. This talk explores the adverse effects of treatment, clinical trials in psychopharmacology, the history of psychopharmacology, and the impact of both trials and psychotropic drugs on our culture. David has been involved as an expert witness in homicide, suicide and birth defect legal actions involving […]

The Rise and Fall of Health Care

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For two centuries, thanks to medical techniques, our life expectancy increased steadily, initially in Western settings and then globally. For the first time in two centuries, life expectancy in America fell for three years in a row. Last year in the United Kingdom life expectancy also fell. In many developed countries, it has stalled. Something […]