The Truth About Big Pharma with Kip Rodgers
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing my friend, Kip Rodgers. Kip is a licensed professional counselor supervisor. She's a certified trainer for the Positive Coaching Alliance. She's a certified life coach, and one of the few certified high performance coaches where she received credential from Brenda Bouchard. She's a speaker, she's an educator, she's a trainer, she conducts workshops and seminars, she helps people discover and improve their beliefs, habits and tools to become successful. Above all, that Kip is a incredible human being. She's one of my closest friends. I learn something from Kip every time I am in her presence. Today she talks about Big Pharma and things you don't know about the industry.
It's important to note, Kip and I are not against medication. We are not against Western medicine, we are not against going to doctors. What we are against is Big Pharma telling us what we have to do, and putting things on the market that can be dangerous, and the practices that they use to convince us that these things are safe.
We asked Kip; What is driving passion?
Kip says:
"I'm actually on probably what is the beginning of a big push. To try to ban Big Pharma from advertising everywhere? If you watch any amount of television, if you look at any websites with any regularity, you will see pharmaceutical companies who are taking up a lot of commercial time and a lot of ad space. I think it's creating a drug dependence nation, which concerns me greatly.
What does psychotropic mean?
Psychotropic medications are medications that are usually described often by like a PCP GP, or a psychiatrist for mental health issues. Things like anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, and all the other made up mental disorders like Seasonal Affective Disorder, they market it and then slap Paxil to that disorder and dispense a lot of medication and make a lot of money. This could be marketed for 1,2,3,4 and 5 year olds. These are actual sourced statistics. For 1, 2, 3 year olds, 7,811 prescriptions for that age group, for 2 to 3 year olds, 12,137 prescriptions and 5 year olds 8,011 prescriptions. This goes on up to where 6 to 12 year olds, have a half 1,000,000 on psychotropic meds, 13 to 17 year olds, gets close to almost 2,000,065 and older 10 yr olds- over 10 million, almost 11 million people on psychotropic medications. Even more, so 45 to 64 year olds, 15,000,611 175. This is mind blowing.
We're making medicating people normal, which is creating dysfunction and/or destruction. So it's having the exact opposite effect. We are the nation that is dispensing the highest amount of these psychotropic medications.
Yet we're still the sickest country, in the nation, when it comes to mental health issues and obesity. It doesn't make sense.
This is what Big Pharma wants. It wants a nation that is drug dependent, so that they can pad their pockets and for their investors. Pfizer is the biggest drug company in the world.
Medicating Normal:
I work with anywhere from a nine year old athlete to 54 year old executives. It doesn't matter what the age ranges, they come into my office, they've been on one medication at an attempt to fix anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, social anxiety that has been marketed as a disease or disorder when it's not. Social anxiety is a popular one, the attempt is to medicate something that's actually normal. It's normal to feel anxiety when you go into a new situation. It's normal to feel anxiety when you don't know what the outcome is going to be when you try something new for the first time. When you walk into a room full of people who you don't know and you're more introverted than extroverted its normal, you don't need a medication to fix it. You're not broken.
The issue is we have doctors who asks a few questions then will then prescribe a medication that starts messing with your neural activity. People report that they've been on three, four or five different psychotropic medications. Then they feel their brain is so okay because of the medication, not because of the initial issue. This is where I have a big struggle with what the medical community is doing, because you cannot medicate what is normal.
It's not going to fix it. We have stopped critically thinking about that. .
It's very normal to growth pains when we go through those things. Life is difficult. It's okay to cry. Sometimes there's anger, sadness, anxiety, all those things. Those are normal, and you have to walk through it. With young people, puberty is awkward for all. You lose a pay, you lose the loved one, you get challenged by a coach, you get challenged by a teacher. You got home responsibilities, school responsibility, sport, responsibility, work responsibility. Sometimes it gets overwhelming because it all seems to happen at one time. There is not a medication on this planet that changes the way you think and believe about it. That's usually the main culprit, to most struggles. As parents and as adults to our children, our spouses,we have to model the way. Walking through these things, not shoving a pill in our mouth.
Why would you ingest something that has this list of horrible side effects?
Most people have no idea, which is the research being done on those types of medications? If the general American public knew how the research and development and FDA approval of these drugs was made, they'd be appalled. It is such an incestuous money racket. I highly encourage people, especially young people on psychotropic drugs, do everything you can to change lifestyle and get off those drugs. It's so damaging.
What are some long term effects of a child or teenager who start on these? What are some long term effects?
You potentially are changing your normal neural activity, if you look at the little small piece of paper that you get with each one of those drugs, open it up, read it, they can't tell you how it actually works. They don't even know if it actually works. But what we do know is is going to go target some area of your brain activity. But most of the research is now done by the pharmaceutical companies.
They don't release all all of their research, they release the good stuff. They typically pay a psychiatrist five figures to put his or her name on it. They get it printed in a reputable journal that we would think. The drug companies turn around and buy these articles from the journal companies to then give to like pediatricians and GPS and PCPs to prove that it's actually a drug that works. All they need from the FDA is like two viable outcomes that show that they work.
We have forgotten that we have brains. And we are allowed to use them.
Dr. Daniel Amon in his book, The End of mental illness, he and I 100% it this is a psychiatrist by trade. He largely believes it's, it's isn't mental illness, it's brain health issues. We're destroying brain health, with our lifestyle with those things that you know, that I mentioned.
Every parent should just read it for their knowledge.
This is such a powerful choice you get to make in the way you feel. You have a choice in what you believe.So choose appropriately. No matter what your circumstances. .
Journal Prompt:
If you've made an appointment with a doctor of any kind make a list of questions. Then, make sure that the doctors ask you about your lifestyle habits before prescribing a medication. If they don't, they're part of the Big Pharma drug cartel and you need to find a different doctor.
