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 . . . Continue reading →
Placebo Effect
Pharma Efforts to Bar Placebo Responders from Trials – WSJ
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 . . . Continue reading →
Commonly recommended Treatments found Worthless
Commonly recommended Treatments found Worthless Wed, 19 Mar 2003 Independent analyses of the clinical studies upon which widely recommended drug treatments have been based, have now been found to be fatally faulty, and the drugs are deemed worthless. An analysis of 83 . . . Continue reading →
Marketing Suicide by Misapplying Population Trends_No Competing Interests?
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. Continue reading →
Controlled Trial: Antidepressants Useless to Treat Anorexia–Risk: 1 of 49 Attempted Suicide
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. Continue reading →
Humbling Reality–Treatments for Depression Often Fail_Boston Globe
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.”
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When Trust in Doctors Erodes
"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."
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Experts Debate Psych Drug Effectiveness, But Overlook Key Element of Recovery_Newsweek
By denigrading all non-chemical interventions, by focusing narrowly on drugs and drugs alone, psychiatry has signed away its profession status. Continue reading →
Big Pharma: The Fool’s Gold that Heals_New Book
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:
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NIMH-funded antidepression drug efficacy / safety studies_What do they prove?
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.
NIMH-funded antidepression drug efficacy / safety studies_What do they prove?
Two studies purporting to report “new encouraging” findings about the efficacy and safety of antidepressants 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.
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18% decrease SSRI use in Youth – NYT / Suicide Risk Not New – Globe / Prozac no different
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 . . . Continue reading →