Chiropractor Carbondale on Medicated Foster Children

ABC News 20/20 Blasts Child Drugging

As reported on ABC News, “A 12-year-old boy told Congress today that he was medicated into a near-stupor with mind-altering drugs during the four years he bounced among foster care homes.”

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the federal government had not done enough to oversee the treatment of foster children with powerful drugs. The report, whose contents were revealed by ABC News on November 30, coincided with a nationwide ABC investigation on the overuse of the most potent mind-altering drugs on many of the country’s nearly 425,000 foster children.

The report found that drug amounts exceeding maximum doses for a child’s age were many times more likely to be prescribed to foster children than to other children in the federal-state program for lower-income people. The GAO, which submitted its findings as part of a Senate hearing, also found that foster children were several times more likely than other Medicaid youngsters to be taking five or more psychotropic drugs at the same time. Among the drugs analyzed were antipsychotics such as Abilify and Risperdal, antidepressants such as Cymbalta and Paxil, and attention-deficit hyperactivity-disorder drugs such as Ritalin and Strattera. [Fox News]

Quoting from the GAO report, “no evidence supports the concomitant use of five or more psychotropic drugs in adults or children, yet hundreds of both foster and nonfoster children in the five states had such a drug regimen. Similarly, thousands of foster and nonfoster children were prescribed doses higher than the maximum levels cited in guidelines developed by Texas based on FDA-approved labels, which GAO’s experts said increases the risk of adverse side effects and does not typically increase the efficacy of the drugs to any significant extent. Further, foster and nonfoster children under 1 year old were prescribed psychotropic drugs, which GAO’s experts said have no established use for mental health conditions in infants; providing them these drugs could result in serious adverse effects.”

ABC News 20/20 aired three episodes exposing the fact that doctors are putting foster children on harmful, mind-altering drugs at rates up to 13 times that of children in the general population.

Watch all the 20/20 episodes on PsychSearch.Net.

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