Unfortunately rational, empirical, and scientific basis requires funding. Our research I believe is guided by profit and sustainable profitability and not pure science or curiosity. Also we as people tend not to like people who rock our boat or prove us wrong or make our jobs obsolete. All are impediments to scientific knowledge.
I still would like to see exactly what the placebo was and not a definition. I can’t accept the Wikipedia definition as solid enough to prevent a lowered dose being used as a placebo.
I have critiques of both the use of pharmaceuticals as well as homeopathy. I see the first as similar to someone fixing a watch with a jack hammer and the second as someone fixing a watch with a strand of hair.
FWIW, there’s a number of issues for that research, and the way it’s been generalized into “science via press release” is even more problematic. Suffice it to say that the conclusions are valid for only a subset of the depressed population, and that a better general conclusion is that some anti-depressants work better than placebo for some people with some types of depression, usually when combined with talk therapy, and some anti-depressants do not work better than placebo for some people with some types of depression.
Glad you’re feeling better. Here’s hoping you’re in the fortunate 50% who have only one major depressive episode.
Here is the problem, though : for any given person with depression, most types of antidepressants will not improve their condition. This is because depression can be a symptom of many different things going wrong in the brain. The way we currently figure out what each person’s wrong thing is is by prescribing different medications and seeing what fixes it. It’s like someone comes in and says they have one bleeding finger, but you can’t know which one it is before you put on a bandage. You can bandage one up, and then find out if that helped with the bleeding, but probably you will have picked the wrong finger. This is a problem for individual patients, but it’s also a problem for drug studies. How do you know that the population you’re testing on would be best served by an SNRI, and not Bupropion instead? Or vice versa? I have a relative with depression that antidepressants wouldn’t help, but that was mostly cleared up with an antipsychotic. How the hell do you predict that, as a prescribing physician? As a researcher? No, I believe that the data your guy cites is probably correct–but that it doesn’t represent the efficacy of these drugs.
