As we reported earlier today, new research has discovered that pharmaceutical companies withheld a handful of nonsignificant and negative data from publication when working to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve atypical antipsychotics. However, the problem was significantly less severe than the publication bias researchers found when looking at antidepressants.
Antidepressants have been especially hard hit when looking at the FDA pre-approval research. In fact, in Lesley Stahl’s recent 60 Minutes report on antidepressant research, she walked away completely baffled by the meaning of it all. What does it mean when researchers find such negative findings that were never published?
Let’s find out…
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, again John, here we can “spin” all day and until the cows come home. First of all there is a huge difference between a drug not lowering your cholesterol like they promised and a drug causing you to behave in a unhealthy dysfunctional way. Or a drug that promise to give you an erection falling flat (ehhmm) and one that causes a person who was originally being treated for OCD or mild anxiety that goes on to kill themselves. If I don’t get an erection, I go back to the doc who say, “ehh, doesn’t work for everybody.” The drug company or the doctor are not at risk of being held liable. If I kill my family in a delusional fit of manic rage, and I can prove that the drug company is more liable then McDonald’s is for a hot cup of coffee, It can cost the drug companies billions and cut the throat of a cash cow for them. A failed study when it comes to antidepressants is much more profound in magnitude then one that doesn’t work for weight loss.
This bring up the second major difference in glassing over a psychotropic drugs. The worst part about antidepressants isn’t that they aren’t working they are working too well. Here is a simplistic analogy. Take a toddler who keeps getting yelled for taking his brothers toys. So (as Stephenson proved in ’67) he develops an anxiety against taking the toy. That anxiety doesn’t mean he doesn’t desire it. The inability to fulfill that desire causes him to be depressed. Of course he can’t keep taking his little brothers toy thought it would make him very happy. We can’t ask his mom to stop punishing at him when he does it, this is an important lesson for a child. But what if we could give him a pill that would reduce the anxiety he feels about getting yelled at. So he starts taking the toy again, ignoring his mother, and he is happy. Now, the only person you can talk to in a study about the pill is the child. He declares he is now happy again. Pill successful!
If a cholesterol pill doesn’t work you can run test and see it. If an ED pill doesn’t work it has other notable signs. If a weight loss pill is causing your hair to fall out, there is direct ways to test it. These are all unwanted symptoms. But if a treatment causes you to become manic, there is no way to tell. There is no money in proving these pills don’t work. There is lots of it in proving they do.
My apologies for the typo and poor grammar. I got called away and just hit submit. Thanks for the time and post.