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Dutch News.nl
Friday 26 March 2010
Psychoanalysis has been scrapped from the basic health insurance package with immediate effect, the body charged with deciding what treatments are covered said this week.
Psychoanalysis, the body of ideas developed by Austrian physician Sigmund Freud, is no longer part of the standard health insurance package because there is insufficient scientific evidence that it works, the CVZ said.
Patients who are currently undergoing psychoanalysis will still be covered but newcomers will have to pay the cost – an estimated €12,500 a year – themselves, the Volkskrant said. Around 600 people are being treated a year, the paper said.
Rob van der Plank, chairman of the Dutch psychoanalysts association, said it is a ‘black day’ for the sector and ‘disastrous’ for patients.
Although health insurance in the Netherlands is offered by private companies, the government is responsible for deciding what treatments should be covered.
© DutchNews.nl
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Will be the rest of psychological techniques scrapped too, in favor of psychotropic drugs -and its manufacturers’ interests, of course? Nobody knows.
Meanwhile Prozac, the antidepressant with 40 million consumers worldwide, is again questioned. According to the results of a meta-analysis published by PLoS Medicine, fluoxetine, the active ingredient of the “happiness pill” has the same effect as taking pills made of sugar, ie placebo.
The same goes for the other two best-selling antidepressant, venlafaxine (Efexor) and paroxetine (Serotax, also known as shyness pill).
The researchers based their findings on a meta-analysis of clinical trials registered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the American institution that should give the go ahead to clinical trials for drug companies to obtain authorization for a drug. Irving Kirsch, a researcher at the University of Hull in the UK signing the study, told The Guardian that “the results suggest that prescribing antidepressants should be restricted even more.”
Precisely the use of Prozac has been questioned in studies that have been associated with violent behavior and suicide, published in the British Medical Journal in 2005.
By the way, i wonder whether people claiming for commands on the streets to hunt Muslims might have been prescribed with psychotropic drugs.