Forget the TV and magazine ads by the Prime Time Pushers, as Mother Jones has called them, read the NY Times and you’ll find articles written by physicians, often psychiatrists, extoling the virtues of antidepressants. Guess what – they don’t work, and placebos are better. As one physician has said, “They say failed doctors [sic] become psychiatrists, and that failed psychiatrists specialise in drugs.” He should have said physicians specialise in “failed drugs.”
Most prescription drugs don’t work, just like most medical procedures don’t work. We’re talking about many drugs and many procedures in the USA. It’s an epidemic. In 1998, at the dawn of consumer advertising of SSRIs for depression, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at U. Michigan, Prof. Dr. Elliot Valenstein, Ph.D., summarized the scientific data by concluding, “What physicians and the public are reading about mental illness is by no means a neutral reflection of all the information that is available.” In other words, physicians and the public alike were being swayed by pharma, including by physicians who are Key Opinion Leaders who have been bribed by the pharma companies to sell drugs. The current state of affairs has only confirmed the veracity of this conclusion. as stated by Lacasse and Leo (2005), “The incongruence between the scientific literature and the claims made in FDA-regulated SSRI advertisements is remarkable, and possibly unparalleled.”
A new study has found that fluoxetine (Prozac) for adolescents, the placebo effect predicted good outcomes, but the actual drug treatment did not. After accounting for “treatment guess” of those who had found out that they were receiving an intervention rather than placebo, the drug was not effective in depression treatment. Subjects who received a placebo but thought they received Prozac improved more than those who received the drug and knew they received the drug. Interpretation – the drug decreased the value of the placebo effect.
The authors conclude, “For Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study, treatment guesses strongly predicted outcomes and may have led to the exaggeration of drug effectiveness in the absence of actual effects. The integrity of double-blinding in trials should be routinely assessed and reported.”
Integrity of clinical trials is a joke when they are sponsored and run by corporations in a regulatory climate of deregulation, privatization, and huge incentives to realize positive results. Run your trial in India, for example, and you’ll get what you want. Faked and flawed clinical trials predominate, not just in India.
Even worse than considering the placebo effect is the death effect of these drugs. Fluoxetine is a FDA-approved antidepressant for use in children and adolescents. Its efficacy has been doubted, and it has been found to increase the risk of suicide in kids. Another recent study found a threefold increase in suicide risk, and another found that the risk may be as high as six times greater. Dosing adults with antidepressants may double the risk of suicide. Suicide is but one risk factor, including possible shrinkage of the brain, for these awful drugs that are sold by psychiatrists
Bottom line, take the placebo, not the drug.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 