Another fascinating emperor-has-no-clothes moment, courtesy of Newsweek and a JAMA article from last year.
The placebo effect-that is, a medical benefit you get from an inert pill or other sham treatment-rests on the holy trinity of belief, expectation, and hope. But telling someone with depression who is being helped by antidepressants, or who (like my friend) hopes to be helped, threatens to topple the whole house of cards…
More than 50 years on, the presumed effectiveness of antidepressants that act this way remains the chief support for the chemical-imbalance theory of depression. Absent that effectiveness, the theory hasn’t a leg to stand on. Direct evidence doesn’t exist.
Who knew? (an MD says piffle, of course antidepressants work!)
on Jan 30th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
Socialism cannot survive without Soma.
–Aldous Huxley
[Actually, I made that up. Try this: Socialism cannot survive without medical marijuana.]
on Jan 30th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
Would you take a drug for high blood pressure if it reduced the chance of a heart attack by 1/3?
Would you take that drug if three people out of one hundred in a certain age group were going to suffer heart attacks, and the drug might reduce that to two?
Would you take that drug if three people out of one hundred in a certain age group were going to suffer heart attacks, and the drug might reduce that to two, and we have no idea of who those three might be or the one that might be saved?
The last sentence is reality. The first is pharma advertising.
on Jan 30th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Would you take that drug if it reduced the gibberish in your blog posts to 2 out of 3 sentences?
on Jan 31st, 2010 at 8:31 am
Max - You are boring and uninteresting. Could you at least be amusing now and then?
on Jan 31st, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Who needs to be amusing when we have you trying to be intelligent?