Education vs. Indoctrination

[Ahriman]

Drugs do have serious side effects, but there is no way they are just placebo. I can attest to that personally.

[no one]

What drugs was mommy doing while she was pregnant with you?

[Ahriman]

What drugs was mommy doing while she was pregnant with you?

Cocaine, probably. My dad's side of the family was (and is) very rich. But I meant prescription drugs.

[Belacqua]

Drugs do have serious side effects, but there is no way they are just placebo. I can attest to that personally.

The article I linked to has a lot of links to scientific studies. I'm not qualified to judge the research, but they are all published by professionals. If you wanted to read them and judge for yourself you could.

This is a study from 2004 which compares antidepressants to placebos:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...nistration

 Prevention & Treatment, Volume 5, Article 23, posted July 15, 2002  Copyright 2002 by the American Psychological Association  The Emperor's New Drugs: An Analysis of Antidepressant Medication Data Submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Irving Kirsch University of Connecticut  

Thomas J. Moore The George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services  
Alan Scoboria and Sarah S. Nicholls University of Connecticut  

ABSTRACT This article reports an analysis of the efficacy data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval of the 6 most widely prescribed antidepressants approved between 1987 and 1999. Approximately 80% of the response to medication was duplicated in placebo control groups, and the mean difference between drug and placebo was approximately 2 points on the 17-item (50-point) and 21-item (62-point) Hamilton Depression Scale. Improvement at the highest doses of medication was not different from improvement at the lowest doses. The proportion of the drug response duplicated by placebo was significantly greater with observed cases (OC) data than with last observation carried forward (LOCF) data. If drug and placebo effects are additive, the pharmacological effects of antidepressants are clinically negligible. If they are not additive, alternative experimental designs are needed for the evaluation of antidepressants.

A key point of the article in Counterpunch is that one study which was used to promote antidepressants 

https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/epd...63.11.1905

has been re-analyzed

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/13/7/e063095

and its results have seriously been called into question

https://www.madinamerica.com/2023/09/the...and-scale/

This last article has lots of links to support its conclusions, if you want to follow up. 

Here is a CBS news report announcing that the serotonin theory of depression is not supported by research. You can judge whether you want to trust CBS or not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y70UaJd60-Y

The Counterpunch article goes into detail about how certain procedures in an influential study were conducted without proper scientific methods. 

Obviously some medicines work better than others, and I see nothing in the papers to suggest that antidepressants never work for anyone. If you've had good luck with them I'm glad. I think that people who are struggling should try anything that has a chance of helping. 

I took Zantac for heartburn for years, until they said "Oh by the way it's carcinogenic." So I stopped. But the Takecab I take now instead seems to work better. We'll see if I live long enough to get side effects from that one.

[Ahriman]

Anti-depressants "work" for me, to varying degrees. I'm still suffering, but I guess nothing is going to change that.

[Belacqua]

Anti-depressants "work" for me, to varying degrees. I'm still suffering, but I guess nothing is going to change that.

I'm glad they work for you, even if it's only a little bit. I wish there were more that could be done.

This is why the pharmaceutical scandals are so particularly immoral. They directly affect health and well-being. If we hadn't lost years chasing false hopes about poorly-researched for-profit medicines, we might have put effort into more effective remedies by this time. 

Probably you're read about the Sackler family and their intentional misinformation regarding Oxycontin. The fact that they could ruin so many lives and still remain out of prison is proof of how deadly it is to mix medicine with the profit motive. If Chinese billionaires had told such lies they'd be executed. 

Anyway, I hope that things can go better for you in the future.

[Ahriman]

Anti-depressants "work" for me, to varying degrees. I'm still suffering, but I guess nothing is going to change that.

I'm glad they work for you, even if it's only a little bit. I wish there were more that could be done.

This is why the pharmaceutical scandals are so particularly immoral. They directly affect health and well-being. If we hadn't lost years chasing false hopes about poorly-researched for-profit medicines, we might have put effort into more effective remedies by this time. 

Probably you're read about the Sackler family and their intentional misinformation regarding Oxycontin. The fact that they could ruin so many lives and still remain out of prison is proof of how deadly it is to mix medicine with the profit motive. If Chinese billionaires had told such lies they'd be executed. 

Anyway, I hope that things can go better for you in the future.

I'm not familiar with that. What happened?

[Belacqua]

I'm glad they work for you, even if it's only a little bit. I wish there were more that could be done.

This is why the pharmaceutical scandals are so particularly immoral. They directly affect health and well-being. If we hadn't lost years chasing false hopes about poorly-researched for-profit medicines, we might have put effort into more effective remedies by this time. 

Probably you're read about the Sackler family and their intentional misinformation regarding Oxycontin. The fact that they could ruin so many lives and still remain out of prison is proof of how deadly it is to mix medicine with the profit motive. If Chinese billionaires had told such lies they'd be executed. 

Anyway, I hope that things can go better for you in the future.

I'm not familiar with that. What happened?

This is from Wikipedia:

The Sackler family is an American family who owned the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma and later founded Mundipharma.[1] Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs, including OxyContin. Purdue Pharma has been criticized for its role in the opioid epidemic in the United States.[2][3][4] They have been described as the "most evil family in America",[5][6][7][8] and "the worst drug dealers in history".[9][10]

The Sackler family has been profiled in various media, including the documentary Crime of the Century on HBO, the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick, the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and the 2023 Netflix mini-series Painkiller.

They knew their new painkiller was addictive, but claimed it wasn't. Then they advertised it hard, and gave doctors incentives to prescribe it. A huge number of people were told they couldn't get addicted, but then they did. Since it's an opioid, when addicts couldn't get prescriptions or black market Oxy any more they just turned to heroin, which is cheaper and more readily available. 

In America rich people don't get punished, so the Sacklers have been fined, but their lawyers continue to fight everything in court. 

It's the poster child for why medicine and the profit motive don't work together.

[Ahriman]

I'm not familiar with that. What happened?

This is from Wikipedia:

The Sackler family is an American family who owned the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma and later founded Mundipharma.[1] Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs, including OxyContin. Purdue Pharma has been criticized for its role in the opioid epidemic in the United States.[2][3][4] They have been described as the "most evil family in America",[5][6][7][8] and "the worst drug dealers in history".[9][10]

The Sackler family has been profiled in various media, including the documentary Crime of the Century on HBO, the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick, the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and the 2023 Netflix mini-series Painkiller.

They knew their new painkiller was addictive, but claimed it wasn't. Then they advertised it hard, and gave doctors incentives to prescribe it. A huge number of people were told they couldn't get addicted, but then they did. Since it's an opioid, when addicts couldn't get prescriptions or black market Oxy any more they just turned to heroin, which is cheaper and more readily available. 

In America rich people don't get punished, so the Sacklers have been fined, but their lawyers continue to fight everything in court. 

It's the poster child for why medicine and the profit motive don't work together.

Okay, so obviously the family is being used as a scapegoat. It's extremely obvious.

[brewer]

I took Zantac for heartburn for years, until they said "Oh by the way it's carcinogenic." So I stopped. But the Takecab I take now instead seems to work better. We'll see if I live long enough to get side effects from that one.

Potential cancer agent from a breakdown product of ranitidine (Zantac) is NDMA.

You might want to look at this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609975/