Posted by dj on February 13, 2000, at 2:13:16
In reply to Strange E-mail, anyone else??, posted by Alison on February 10, 2000, at 2:10:16
I attempted to post this earlier from my home machine but Dr. Bob has successfully
censured that route, for now. However there are many roads to Psycho-Babble and
other places on-line. This is one of them.I have previously admitted and apologized for being somewhat out of line for some of
my more challenging postings to folks who I felt, and still do, were over the top with
the expression of their beliefs, as I was with mine, a little bit. They have not been warned, nor has censorship been attempted against them for some pretty outrageous postings including one that accused me of being "Satan's disciple" -- now that's defamatory language and much harsher than I've ever used in my occasional rants, when my passion has overuled my civility, marginally.And frankly I've attributed a wider range of useful scientificly focused info.
outside of pharmo-babble than many and certainly the preachers, (who didn't practice core Christian principles of compassion for all in some of their more outrageous comments). Certainly they contributed nothing of scientific value under their pseudo-symbols.But I shan't rant any more for now. I just wanted to contribute some info. which I consider relevant to the ongoing discussion along with references. One which I skipped in the earlier posting, which looks very good in the context of my comments below, is the book "The Wisdom of Depression" by Jonathan Zeuss, MD, which I am currently checking out.
Looks interesting, though perhaps a bit over the top in some areas. So following this are the comments which I was temporarily delayed in posting. I shall be following the ongoing discussion intermittantly and though I won't go out of my way to post, I shall on occasion cuz no body is going to censor me for being a little bit querlous. And a Scottish toast to accompany this: "Here's to those who wish me well and all the rest can go to hell."
Alison,
I've been taking some reflective and mental health leave from babbleland and posting, but occasonally check in and could not resist replying to your post. Salon.com is owned by MicroSoft and despite it's ownership is considered one of the better on-line magazines. The fact that some of the higher quality newspapers use salon.com stories reflects the value of their content. You must have impressed the journalist who contacted you with your posting.
Call her collect, if you feel like participating, because she should have the budget for it.
In additon to telling her about your own experience (should you chose to do so) you might point her in the direction of the recent NY Times magazine article on placebos (someone posted the url a couple of weeks back): "The Placebo Prescription". Here's an interesting excerpt from it:
"The truth is that the placebo effect is huge -- anywhere between 35 and 75 percent of patients benefit from taking a dummy pill in studies of new drugs -- so huge, in fact, that it should probably be put to conscious use in clinical practice, even if we do not entirely understand how it works...
Last year, the pharmaceutical company Merck announced that it was halting development of MK-869, a new antidepressant it had been promoting for months as a blockbuster drug on the scale of Prozac. Alas, the dummy pills worked just as well.
...But can a placebo ever make you better if you know it's a placebo? Doesn't its agency lie only in the reasonable expectation -- the 50-50 chance, at least -- that you're getting the real thing? Does a placebo cease to be a placebo when you call its bluff?
Maybe the best way to consider whether Brown's idea would work in practice is to apply it to depression. That was the ailment for which he first suggested deliberate placebo treatment, back in 1994, in an article in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Since then, evidence that depression is an especially placebo-sensitive condition has only been mounting. The splashiest comes from Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, who contends that the multibillion-dollar success of Prozac and its brethren may be attributed almost entirely to the placebo effect.
In a study published this past June, Kirsch and his co-author, Guy Sapirstein of the Westwood Lodge Hospital in Needham, Mass., analyzed 19 clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that the expectation of improvement, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 percent of the drugs' effectiveness. Kirsch says a study he is working on now, based on the clinical trials that won F.D.A. approval for the drugs Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone, bears out the earlier one. "The critical factor," says Kirsch, "is our beliefs about what's going to happen to us. You don't have to rely on drugs to see profound transformation."
...Plenty of informed people -- and not just shills for the pharmaceutical industry or dedicated Listeners to Prozac -- think Kirsch goes too far. It's as if "he set out to prove that all antidepressant medication is a sham," says Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, "and the evidence is not on his side there." Hyman points out that for ethical reasons, very few of the patients selected for outpatient antidepressant trials are severely depressed.
No honorable researcher who thinks a patient might be suicidal, for instance, is going to sign him up for a study where he may well be getting only a dummy pill. That leaves a patient pool of the mild to moderately depressed -- and mild to moderate depression is a disease that waxes and wanes. "So the alternative explanation to the one Kirsch is offering is that these were people who weren't all that ill to begin with," says Hyman.
But even if Kirsch's case proves too extreme, that still leaves a placebo response rate of between 30 to 40 percent, meaning that 30 to 40 percent of the depressed subjects in clinical trials feel happier while taking a contentless pill. And there is good reason to think that that may be an underestimate..."
Having weaned myself from anti-depressants I am feeling (more so than when under their impact) much better thanks to various lifestyle changes incuding, improved diet and the effects of lots of concentrated so-called 'alternative' approachs (acupuncture, massage, chiropractory and group dynamics but not using the medical model). The latter dealt to a large degree with the very, real physical effects (for me or were they part of root cause?) of depression (muscular and skelatal rigidity - though sitting in front of a computer for long periods of time without stretching intermittantly contributes to this too) which go hand in hand with similar mental effects.
Diverging back to my point, the reason I mention the placebo effect is because of the questionable quality of many so-called health supplements, thanks to low standards of proof of content. Here's a copy of an on-line article from a couple of years ago which reflects similar findings I recently heard echoed on a couple of the CBC's (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio programs (the url is http://www.about.com but because of frames I can't post the exact link and will post the article in full, as I believe it is valuable info.:
"St. John's Wort Fails Potency Tests
This section is maintained by Frank M. Painter, D.C.
Send all comments or additions to: [email protected]
August 31, 1998 Web posted at: 11:57 a.m. EDT (1557 GMT)
In this story: Supplements immune from government regulation Industry giant disputes findings
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Several of the nation's leading brands of St. John's Wort, a popular herbal remedy for depression, are not as potent as advertised on their labels, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday. In an independent test commissioned by the Times, three of 10 brands of St. John's Wort had no more than about half the potency listed on the label.
Four other brands had less than 90 percent of the potency listed, the Times reported. Health experts told the newspaper that a significant number of depressed people may be pinning hopes on products too weak to help them even when taken at the recommended dosages.
"How is it possible to appropriately regulate a treatment regimen if you can't even be sure of the dosage?" said Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a research psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, who believes in St. John's Wort's mood-elevating properties.
"You're using this product for important reasons and you want to know you're getting what you're supposed to be getting", he said. "It's quite important that there should be truth in advertising."
The findings raise concerns over the booming herbal market. Sales of St. John's Wort and other botanical remedies, including ginseng, ginkgo biloba, echinacea and saw palmetto may reach $4.3 billion this year, according to Nutrition Business Journal. Sally Guthrie, a University of Michigan pharmacy professor, said one concern is that, unlike pharmaceutical drugs, herbal supplements do not undergo government scrutiny before marketing. The Food and Drug Administration can seize dietary supplements that turn out to be harmful, fraudulent or improperly promoted. So people taking St. John's Wort can't be assured from batch to batch and manufacturer to manufacturer that they're getting the same quality or amount", she said.
St. John's Wort, a weed also known as hypericum, has a long record as a nerve tonic. The golden flower, with its extract hypericin, has long been used in folk medicine. In the study the Times commissioned, 10 pills were sampled from each of three containers of one lot of each product. The products were identified only with a code, so the laboratory would not know the brand being tested. Five independent experts who reviewed the research procedures said the approach was sound.
One of the lowest-scoring products sampled, with about 20 percent of the labeled potency, was from Sundown Herbals, a division of Rexall, the nation's No. 1 distributor of dietary supplements. Deborah Shur Trinker, Sundown's vice president of regulatory affairs, responded to the findings by saying they were "false" and "misleading". In a letter to the Times, Ms. Trinker said the tests involved too few pills for the findings to be significant. She said an independent lab hired by Sundown had found the product to be 100 percent potent. Two of the other low scoring companies, Pure Source and Futurebiotics, declined to comment. Officials of Trader's, a Southern California market chain, said they would stop selling the St. John's Wort brands that tested poorly."
Anyway, it's sunny out. I've spent far too much time both here and on-line and I have more pressing things to do that are of direct value to me. I'm back off to the sunny limbo of what looks like spring on Canada's wet coast, which is anything but today. : )
> ... a lady called Dawn MacKeen who works for www.salon.com. She wanted to interview me about the effects of taking SSRI's and SJW. I went and had a look at the website and it just looks >really trashy and a load of BS
poster:dj
thread:20969
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000209/msgs/21316.html