Antidepressants-simply a confidence trick

[Dr Afzal]

Here is part of an interesting article about antidepressants (a link to the full article is below)

 

………"I decided the best way to convince people that antidepressants were largely placebos was to look at the drug companies' own data.

At the time, I was working at the University of Connecticut, so I used the Freedom of Information Act to force the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, which licenses drugs, to let me see all the trials the drug companies had run to get the most popular antidepressants approved.

That's when I got another shock.

More than half of the trials showed no difference at all between the drugs and the placebos - but most of those negative trials had never been published.

 

In other words, the benefits of antidepressants were even smaller than I'd thought, but the drug companies had hidden the data showing this.

 

Information about the best way to treat patients was being hidden from doctors, and so billions of pounds were being wasted and patients were being exposed to dangerous chemicals for no real benefit"……….

 

Link to full article

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1299791/Why-antidepressants-simply-confidence-trick-A-leading-psychologist-claims-taking-sugar-pills-work-just-well.html

[Cyclone]

So they handed these studies over for an FOI request, but the FDA hasn't seen them... Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.

[komal]

actually took that seriously for a second then saw the link

[RichJay]

If anyone is interested, here is the link to one of the papers published that the daily mail article is based on...

 

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045

 

The criticism of the study in the comments section are particularly interesting.