Dr. Patricia Halligan and Shane Kenny discuss the FDA's findings about how patients were injured and harmed by overprescribing benzodiazepines.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Shane Kenny:
I wonder, have you seen the article I did for Mad In America and other websites about the FDA's new stand on benzodiazepines? Because it's extraordinary to me that an organization like the FDA, which has a responsibility for looking after people's health and safety in relation to drugs, that they could do an investigation of people who've made complaints to their site. There are over 300,000 complaints that they've had since they first started getting these kind of complaints about benzodiazepines. 300,000, it's an enormous number.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
And that's only the reported number. How many went unreported?
Shane Kenny:
Yes, I'm sure there's a lot more people who have been affected by benzodiazepines. But the critical thing was that they didn't investigate the 300,000 complaints. They did a subset of 104 cases which they said covered some of the main aspects. But that leaves something begging I'm afraid. But what they did find, even in this 104 cases, were some very dramatic things about benzodiazepines. In particular, what I consider to be the really, really serious issue, which the FDA and other health organizations have never confronted … and that is that the side effects can continue for years and years. And probably permanently. But certainly possibly permanently. We just have no studies done on the kind of damage and harm that have been done to people over very many decades.
And of course people don't understand, doctors don't understand. Sometimes they've shut their ears to people coming into their surgeries, complaining about the drugs that they've been prescribed causing them these problems. They refuse to believe it. And in some cases, of course, as you know, they throw the patients out, literally. They won't treat them. But I want to read the words which the FDA itself used in describing what they found that people had suffered severe withdrawal side effects that had lasted from weeks to years — weeks to years — that's long term harm.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
It's devastating. And what does this cause? How does this derail the patient's lives?
Shane Kenny:
Well, there's an awful lot of people who are like me. I mean, it put an end to my entire career. I was still continuing to broadcast regularly. I was the director of public affairs in Dublin City University, one of the leading technology universities in Ireland. And I also had my own media business in production and training and everything went … within six months of me being affected. Most people would find it hard to conceive of how awful it is to be affected by these drugs, which have damaged the central nervous system. And your entire central nervous system is malfunctioning. And you are living in that body. As Dr. John O'Connor, an Irish doctor and expert on benzodiazepines, told me … his phrase for it was that your body becomes your own torture chamber. And all of your sensations, sound, touch, the sensation on your skin inside your body with your veins. It's like having a continuous electric shock, or certainly it was for me.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
Oh, that is torture. That is torture.
Shane Kenny:
Absolute torture. And there's no way of stopping it. People who give electric torture to prisoners, they have to go away and eat sometimes, you know? And they stop. But there is no stop. And that's one of the reasons why people take their own lives.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
It's unbearable, isn't it?
Shane Kenny:
It's completely unbearable. Yes.
Dr. Patricia Halligan:
For years.
Shane Kenny:
And it very nearly was like that for me.
Shane Kenny Bio:
Shane Kenny is a broadcaster and a journalist who worked for 30 years as a frontline presenter and editor for RTE, the Irish national broadcaster.
In 1989, he won the Irish national media award for Supreme contribution to Irish journalism. During the years, 1994 to 1997, he served as press secretary for the Irish government before returning to RTE. In 2003, he established his own independent media and production and training. From 2005 to 2011, he was also director of public affairs and member of the executive board of Dublin city university.
The last three years, unable to work because of serious illness caused by being treated with Valium, Shane started working on his unique documentary, "the benzodiazepine medical disaster" in 2014, while still very ill and continues to suffer from the disease caused by the drug to this day.
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