Four-year-old Rebecca Riley died late last year from an overdose of prescribed medications.

Rebecca was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity and bipolar disorders, even though teachers and school nurses said they never saw her engage in behavior that warranted the potent drugs she was given.

Her parents, who have been arrested on murder charges for giving her the drugs, say they were only following their doctor's orders. They have accused Rebecca's psychiatrist, Kayoko Kifuji, of over-prescribing medication. Kifuji, in turn, claims that the parents increased Rebecca's dosage of drugs on their own, despite warnings that doing so would be dangerous.

However, when social workers met with the family's doctors not long before her death, they were assured that she was taking drugs at levels within medical guidelines.

Dr. Mercola's Comment:

This case of a 4-year-old who died from massive amounts of toxic drugs in her system is a devastating, real-world case of a health care system that medicates before thinking, no matter what the cost.

The drugs prescribed to Rebecca included Clonidine, Depakote, an antihistamine and cough suppressant. According to medical examiners, the amount of Clonidine found in Rebecca's system alone was enough to be fatal.

Rebecca's death was indeed tragic, but I view her experience as a metaphor for what is wrong with the entire conventional approach to medicine. It has morphed into a system that is optimized to train health care professionals in the belief system that drugs and surgery are the primary solution for nearly every one of our health challenges.

Was an overdose of drugs given to Rebecca by her parents? Was too much prescribed to her by her psychiatrist? These are not the right questions. What we should be asking is, why was this toxic cocktail of multiple drugs, at any dosage, being prescribed to a 4-year-old in the first place?

There are dozens of children like Rebecca who die EVERY day from similar circumstances in which they were given drugs that in no way, shape or form would ever address the underlying cause of their problem.

I firmly believe that the answer involves taking responsibility for yourself and family and Taking Control of Your Health. When a drug solution is offered to you think HARD about whether you really want to take that choice. Ideally you will want to move to the position where this is the last reasonable option and it is the lesser of two evils.

Be a skeptic. Double check everything you are told. You can certainly use my site as I have compiled over 100,000 free pages of information over the last 10 years, but don't stop there. Use Google and search many sites.

If the topic is important enough, spend a few hours surfing around so you can rule out some of the wackiness that is not properly peer-reviewed. After awhile you will develop a relatively clear consensus of the truth.

How?

It will start to make sense. Your body (more precisely your gut) will tell you you are on to something as it rings of truth. The only challenge you will have is to allow yourself to be OPEN to the concept that you might have been brainwashed for years or decades by "experts" that had no idea of the truth.

Trust yourself that you will recognize the truth when you see it.

If it doesn't sound right to you, keep on searching.

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