Advisory Committee tells FDA: strengthen warnings on SSRI drug labels now Wed, 4 Feb 2004 On February 2, more than 60 families and children from all across America testified at a public FDA advisory committee hearing describing (in 2 minutes) how their children suffered drug-induced harm after being prescribed an…
Credibility Crisis:Survey FDA Scientists – Death in NIH-AIDS Trial – Tauzin Moves to PhRMA Thu, 16 Dec 2004 A credibility crisis in medical research is smoldering: like the Enron accounting scandal, the prescription-drug debacle is a matter of systemic corruption, including gross and widespread failure by the regulatory process. Unlike…
Pharma Efforts to Bar Placebo Responders from Trials – WSJ Fri, 25 Jun 2004 A clinical trial report in The Lancet debunks the value of Aricept, a popular drug prescribed for Alzheimer’s patients. The findings of a three-year placebo controlled trial show that: “Although the patients taking the drug did…
Suicide rates fluctuate. Like the stock market their rise and fall is not due to a single decisive cause, but rather to a confluence of complex factors.
A team of researchers from Columbia University and the University of Toronto, headed by Dr. Timothy Walsh (New York) tested the effect of antidepressants in the treatment of anorexia in a placebo controlled randomized trial.
The Boston Globe reports (below): “More than 50 years after psychiatrists began widely dispensing drugs to treat mental illness, the profession is coming face to face with a humbling reality: Its treatments often fail, leaving millions of patients [ ] to suffer while doctors search for something that works.”
"Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment."
By denigrading all non-chemical interventions, by focusing narrowly on drugs and drugs alone, psychiatry has signed away its profession status.
Big Pharma by Jacky Law reveals that in essence, most of the pharmaceutical industry’s claims are false; it is not the drug, but the placebo effect whose potency deserves almost all of the credit for any health improvement:
Two studies purporting to report “new encouraging” findings about the efficacy and safety of antidepressants—as tested in the “real world”—were published on Sunday by The American Journal of Psychiatry with an accompanying editorial by Dr. Thomas Insel, director of these studies’ funding agency, the National Institute of Mental Health.
18% decrease SSRI use in Youth – NYT / Suicide Risk Not New – Globe / Prozac no different Tue, 21 Sep 2004 The FDA failed to stop drug manufacturers from flooding the air waves and the scientific literature with false and scientifically invalid claims-based on partial data. “The FDA…
Tell the Truth About Antidepressants On Drug Labels & in Medical Journals Thu, 16 Sep 2004 An April, 2004 editorial in the New York Times noted: “What seems most astonishing is the skimpy evidence that these drugs work at all in most young patients.” What is astonishing is how the…
