Posted by linkadge on July 15, 2006, at 21:43:43
In reply to Re: couldn't have said it better myself, posted by cecilia on July 15, 2006, at 7:02:43
>It seems to me that a study with no placebo arm >is going to have a much higher percentage of >placebo responders than one without, simply >because everyone knows for sure they are getting >a real drug and have higher expectations.
Bingo. It was also noted before, that dispite the 'best possable treatment', a significant portion of those with depression will not achieve adequate results.
In addition, there aren't too many studies that follow these individuals to see if their treatments actually continue to work down the road. This is usually the ultimate test. Its easy to get a response with all the bells a whistles, but when the support leaves, and all you've got is a drug, relapse rates are high. Same thing goes with hospital treatment. Who knows what percentage of persons are getting better due to the "treatment" effect. I relapsed within 2 weeks of leaving the hospital on a high dose of zoloft. I wasn't quite sure if I got better because of the zoloft, or the fact that the hospital cafeteria served really good bacon.
It is easy enough to ramp people up to a high dose of antidepressants to get some initial responses, but with the growing information bank regarding AD poop out we could add to the statistics. I read some statistic stating that ~30% of AD responces end up pooping. So maybe only 35% of people actually get any long term benifit.
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:662854
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060709/msgs/667403.html