You should LOVE this one. It's written tongue in cheek, but the problem is real and the excuses for using Versed in this fashion are not outside the realms of possibility.
I took the liberty of reproducing the article here from the above link. I DID NOT WRITE THIS! Some people have problems recognising the fact that *I* don't write every single essay bashing Versed. No I don't and I did not write this one.
MONDAY, MAY 5, 2014
Truth serum?
The kid screamed back, "You like me?! You want to rape me?!"
After like 10 minutes of trying to calm him down, they decided to give up on the procedure for the day. The patient had stopped screaming enough for the doctors to explain that they were about to get his parents, and that seem to relax him. While the doctor was in the waiting room explaining to the parents about the child's adverse reaction to the drugs he heard a nurse yelling, "He's running!"
The child had apparently faked compliance to trick his captors into thinking he would cooperate with them. Really, he was just biding his time to escape. Unfortunately, as he sprinted away from the clinic, he seemed to be headed directly for a busy street and was still in his impaired condition. The doctor kicked off his clogs and started running after him in his socks. When the kid saw the doctor behind him, he freaked out again, running even faster. Finally the doctor caught up with him and tackled him to the ground before he ran out into the busy intersection.
But the stories that I thought were most interesting from a philosophical point of view were the stories about patient reactions to the drug Versed/Midazolam. Apparently it is a psychoactive drug with some funny side-effects. From Wikipedia:
In susceptible individuals, midazolam has been known to cause a paradoxical reaction, a well-documented complication with benzodiazapines. When this occurs, the individual may experience anxiety, involuntary movements, aggressive or violent behavior, uncontrollable crying or verbalization, and other similar effects. This seems to be related to the altered state of consciousness or disinhibition produced by the drug.
From the doctors' stories, it seems that the most common manifestation of this in female patients is to cry. For the male patients, a very common manifestation of the verbalization is to turn into complete perverts. One of the female doctors was telling me that it was really eye-opening to her to have this uptight conservative businessmen come in for their procedures and then say raunchy-as-hell things once the Versed gets flowing.
I asked them perhaps the age old question, which is the real them? is the Versed version the more authentic version of the patient? (In vino veritas?) Or does the Versed alter their natural thought patterns? The doctors seemed to think it was definitely the former. As an example, one doctor told me about one of her patients that seemed so inappropriate on Versed that she looked him up online afterwards and found out that he was a relatively prominent public figure who had a history of sexual indiscretions and cover-ups. The thing about Versed is that it also causes temporary amnesia, so the patient doesn't typically remember how they behaved on the drug.
I, of course, thought that an enterprising unethical doctor should start taking video of these patients and using the tapes for blackmail. What better way to ruin someone's life than to shame them in the court of public opinion, right? And they deserve it too, I bet. Best case (?) scenario, the patient/target is not aware that he has these particular flaws and we're doing him/her a favor by letting him/her know about them in no uncertain terms. Worst case scenario, the patient/target already knows about his/her character flaw and has been working overtime to mask it from the general public. Fakers. We should not have to tolerate this level of deception and/or hypocrisy from our fellow humans. These people deserve to be outted. If they are innocent, harmless, or if there is nothing really wrong with what they're doing then I'm sure they'll be fine. If bad things happen to them, then they obviously must have gotten what they deserved.
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