Posted by spike4848 on February 8, 2002, at 0:30:47
In reply to Re: Forest Labs gets US conditional approval for Lexa., posted by OldSchool on February 7, 2002, at 10:54:38
>My beef with the SSRIs is that these drugs simply DO NOT WORK good enough in a percentage of depressed people...approximately 20% to 30% of those with major depression.> Old School
Once again .... I totally agree with Old School. And if you press the pdocs hard enough, they will admit that the SSRIs are pretty weak antidepressants compared to the TCAs/MAOIs. They will tell you that the quality response to SSRIs is moderate at best .... the patients are still impaired. SSRIs are basically mindless to prescribe for the pdocs .... dosing is easy, little risk of OD, fewer drug interactions and lots of perks from the drug representative (dinner, gifts, etc). And the drug studies are designed by idiots .... they say a patient whose symptoms decrease by 50% is a responder to a medication. Take my symptoms and decrease them by 50% and I just can make it out of bed. I don't call that a response.
Donald Klein .... one of the Godfathers of psychiatry from Columbia ..... is currently making a HUGE beef with todays drug trials and drug companies. He is breaking the silence amongst the pdoc and pushing for better drug trials. Trials with stricter definitions of response and including patients with moderate to severe depression. He is calling to revamp the whole system ..... he admits that there are still up to 30-50% of patients with no response or inadequate response to medications. Finally a pdoc with some guts!
So giving the world the isomer of Celexa just doesn't cut it for me and so many millions of patients with severe depression ...... give us a potent med to knock the crap out of the this depression.
Spike
poster:spike4848
thread:91928
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20020131/msgs/93278.html