Placebo effect beats God, Prozac, By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Placebo effect beats God, Prozac
By Mark Morford

This is the story of three drugs. Except one is not really a drug at all and is merely an illusion, a nifty construct, an intense belief that it might be a drug, even though, as mentioned, it is very much not. We just think it is. Isn't that strange? Wonderful? Both?

The three drugs -- which, sorry, are not so much drugs as they are modes of comprehending our own weird little minds, needs and inherent psychoses -- are presented here by way of two recent studies that essentially reinforce what similar studies have been declaring for years and decades and, in the second case, since the ancient mystics suckled wild plants in the forest, licked God, found the source of the soul, and said, you know, holy f--.

Let's lay it out: According to a major new overview study, all of America's beloved wonderdrug antidepressants -- all the Prozacs, Paxils, Effexors, Zolofts of the world -- are essentially useless and don't really work worth a damn.

Wait, that's not quite right. They can sort of work just fine, help millions of people and have enjoyed tremendous success. But there's a huge caveat: Statistically speaking, all these drugs work no better -- and often are far worse for you -- than sugar pills, fake pills, placebos that patients only think are powerful, mind-altering compounds, but which in fact are no more chemically miraculous than a peppermint Altoid. ...

(click here to read the rest)

(Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/04/28/notes042810.DTL&nl=fix)

[madokie]

1. Sorry but I gotta kick this one time at least

i was given paxil once and let me tell you I'll never do that again. It took days for that to wear off. I'm just happy that I had no gun to kill myself with and I that I had enough foresight to only try a half a pill to begin with. I told my doctor that I'd be strangling him if he ever slipped something like that to me again. Some people, me included, have some seriously fucked side effects from that family of pills. I never did figure that one out as I have anxiety not depression to begin with so why were they pushing this off on me. Steppenwolf's, damn the pusher man comes to mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XqyGoE2Q4Y

[cilla4progress]

7. Interesting...

I had a really bad effect with Prozac, and switched to Paxil, which "seemed" to really help. The Paxil IS for anxiety; Prozac for depression. It just hyped me up more!

I'm off all of them now and have been for years - and glad to be. But it did help me through a rough patch...or so I thought?

Hmmmm?

[malaise]

2. K & R

This would be hilarious if people weren't making so much money off this racket and of course the world's greatest and oldest con - religion.

add

[madokie]

3. Yes so true

Its the 'legal' drugs that are killing everyone who is dying from drug overdoses around here and I've known of and read of plenty of them these last few years. I've got a neighbor who is a pusher of prescription pills that is suspected in three overdoses but yet he's still right there next door with his crazy and pit bulls selling his pills. You have no idea as to the times I've wanted to snitch him out but I'm not a snitch so I can't do it.

Having said all that, Recreational drugs should be legal, pot for sure and if that one was there would hardly be any demand for the others. meth, I have to draw the line on though, its some bad bad bad stuff, it kills the users a slow death. I know I have friends who are in the grave because of it and know some more who are headed that way. I don't run in that crowd anymore and I never was a meth user and the only thing that brought us together was the illegality of the two drugs, pot and meth. If pot was legal I could not have written anything I just wrote because I would never have been around the people who used meth to start with to befriend in the first place. :hi:

[HughMoran]

4. While my initial reaction in the broad-sense is "of course"

...upon reading the article and the linked Newsweek article, it occurred to me that I took 4 different anti-depressants and only one actually didn't make me feel worse. The one that helped had probably saved my life as I was unable to deal with the major meltdown that had occurred during the time of my divorce. In general though, I would agree that most turn-downs can be averted though 'just believing' that you will get past this (using whatever technique works for you as an individual.) Through use of an anti-depressant, I was able to get far enough above the quicksand to develop some techniques that I use to this day to prevent re-occurrence of depression. Placebo is a psychological trick that works best when the subject is fully convinced (aka doctors prescription) that they are taking a helpful substance. Even then, the placebo effect was 75-80% of the effect of the drug, not accounting for the fact, as stated above, that certain drugs don't work at all for certain people. If you consider that certain drugs are incompatible with a certain percentage of people (side effects, just not effective), I think the potential positive effects for certain people (like me!) should not be completely discounted (and the articles are careful not to state that placebo is a 100% cure.) So I agree in general, believing that you will get better is 75% of the battle. The problem is, it's not that easy to convince a heavily depressed person that they will indeed get better without external help (i.e., the 'prescribed drug'.) This is not as simple as Mark Morford implies in his article. Below is an extract from the Newsweek article that emphasizes what I am pointing out WRT very severely depressed patients (as I was):

"So concluded the JAMA study in January. In an analysis of six large experiments in which, as usual, depressed patients received either a placebo or an active drug, the true drug effect—that is, in addition to the placebo effect—was "nonexistent to negligible" in patients with mild, moderate, and even severe depression. Only in patients with very severe symptoms (scoring 23 or above on the standard scale) was there a statistically significant drug benefit. Such patients account for about 13 percent of people with depression. "Most people don't need an active drug," says Vanderbilt's Hollon, a coauthor of the study. "For a lot of folks, you're going to do as well on a sugar pill or on conversations with your physicians as you will on medication. It doesn't matter what you do; it's just the fact that you're doing something." But people with very severe depression are different, he believes. "My personal view is the placebo effect gets you pretty far, but for those with very severe, more chronic conditions, it's harder to knock down and placebos are less adequate," says Hollon. Why that should be remains a mystery, admits coauthor Robert DeRubeis of the University of Pennsylvania."

[Dawgs]

5. Prozac worked for me.

There is no way that any study or article is going to convince me otherwise.

A placebo wouldn't have done shit for someone in my condition.

[Blue_Tires]

6. YMMV

I was given a lot of different anti-depressants until I found something that worked for me...Of course, the prescriptions are simply a means, not an end...Added to a combination of therapy, exercise, and some personal lifestyle changes, I'm now living a new life...