[lbo-talk] let's argue about the cause of mental illness

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Thu Aug 27 18:55:57 PDT 2009


oh, and i forgot. a drug can pass the test if it can cough up two studies that support it's efficacy. 17 others can demonstrate nothing. Zoloft, for instance, was found to do nothing in 8 studies conducted by Pfizer. When they showed 2 that demonstrated something, the FDA approved it.

Dr Paul Leber participated in the FDA review of Zoloft, expressing concerns, "How do we interpret ... two positive results in the context of several more studies that fail to demonstrate that effect?" He asked this question in 1990, as part of the committee considering Zoloft's approval. He went on to say, "I am not sure I have an answer to that, but I am not sure that the law requires me to have an answer to that -- fortunately or unfortunately. That would mean, n a sense, that the sponsor could just do studies until the cows come home until he gets two of them that are statistically significant by chance alone, walks them out and says he had met the criteria."

Petersen writes,

"And that appears to be what most of the manufacturers of antidepressants have done. In 2002, Dr. Arif Khan, a psychiatrist (<--- so probably not anti-psychiatry! shag) in Bellevue, WA, reviewed the data from the dozens of clinical trails that companies had performed to prove that Zoloft, Prozax, Paxil, and six other antidepresesants actually worked. .. Dr. Khan and his colleagues found fifty-two completed trials of these drugs, which involved more than ten thousand patients.

In more than half of these studies, the sugar tablet relieved the patients' depression just as well as, or better than, the antidepressant."

citations:

Transcript from Stephen S. Hall's article, "The Claritin Effect: Prescription for Profit," The New York Times Magaqzine. March 11, 2001

Dr. Paul Leber at FDA Psycholpharmacological Dugs Advisory Committee meeting of Nov 19, 1998

Khan et al., "Are Placebo Controls Necessary to Test New Antidepressants and Anxiolytics?", International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, Sept 2002.

At 09:21 PM 8/27/2009, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>At 04:24 PM 8/27/2009, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>>to the point.
>>
>>and (with a tip of the hat to Bill in the other thread) I'd rather have a
>>bottle in front of me than have to have a frontal lobotomy, as the old song
>>goes. I might be drunk, but at least I'm not insane.
>>
>>
>>/maybe bottle here could be either bottle of booze or bottle of SSRIs
>
>
>heh. i couldn't find where you wrote it, but you said something earlier is
>this fork in the thread about weighing risks and benefits, which is what
>Petersen focuses on throughout. She writes about studies of
>antidepressents found to be only a slight improvement on nothing. But the
>slight improvement invariably comes with the side effects.
>
>so how do you weigh that?
>
>and then there's paxil, which the companies own (supressed) studies showed
>to have no benefit for adolescent depression. In fact, the studies showed
>that the drug resulted in suicidal ideation at twice the rate among those
>teens taking the drug. as we now know, GlaxoSmithKline, as the company's
>now known, supressed the findings. Glaxo's execs sent a letter to sales
>reps telling that "cutting edge" research demonstrated that paxil had
>"REMARKABLE efficacy and safety in the treatment of adolescent depression."
>
>She goes on to demonstrate the same problems with surpressed research and
>outrageous marketing claims for NSAIDS (pain medication), Propulsid (for
>heartburn), Zanax, Ambien, Claritin, Celebrex, various statin drugs, etc.
>and so forth.
>
>All of these drugs were marketed on the basis of highly dubious claims
>about their efficacy and/or by totally supressing negative findings. One
>study found that 50% of pharmaceutical trials are never published.
>
>The thing is, people aren't able to make a decision weighing costs and
>benefits because they don't have all the information. And they can't trust
>their doctors to have it, either. It has been well-known since when I was
>in grad school, based on studies in the 70s and 80s, that physicians lack
>the basic skills needed to assess research findings and are very easily
>influenced by advertisements and marketing press packs, and other
>gimmicks. These days, they are recruited to ostensibly be the
>representative or lead researcher on a study when, in fact, the study is
>completely directed by the company's marketing department. Ghost writers
>write editorials for the AMA -- a practice that was exposed by a physician
>who was asked if, for a sum of money, he'd say he wrote such an editorial
>when in fact it was being written f or him by the pharmaceutical company.
>
>i won't belabor the point. I'm sure this book is scanned to google. :)
>
>so, it's a great idea to weigh costs/benefits for yourself. the problem
>is, the entire industry is dead set against you actually having access to
>the information that would allow you to do that.
>___________________________________
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