Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13202

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Spence D.
Bitter sweets
BMJ 2008 Mar 8; 336:(7643):562
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/336/7643/532

Abstract:

We clinicians have a stereotyped view of university academics: bearded cyclists, with sandals and odd terry socks, writing books that no one will read but that, fortunately, they never finish. But our academic comrades can enjoy a moment in the sun. Splashed across all the media, a recent meta-analysis of antidepressants concluded, after a reanalysis of unpublished data released through freedom of information legislation, that they are no better than placebo in all but severe cases of depression (BMJ 2008;336:466 doi: 10.1136/bmj.39503.656852.DB, 2008;336:532-4 doi: 10.1136/bmj.39504.662685.0F). The study seems to vindicate the position, held by many, that antidepressants are overprescribed. However, this isn’t a time to say “we told you so” but an opportunity to reflect.

Leaving aside the merits (or lack thereof) of the study, why weren’t these conclusions available a decade ago? Private companies own the data from trials and have enormous vested interests in controlling . . .

destwo@yahoo.co.uk

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909