Posted by seldomseen on January 6, 2008, at 16:26:59
In reply to Re: What is so controversial here?, posted by Jamal Spelling on January 6, 2008, at 11:46:13
If a single cancer chemotherapy drug was effective in 30% of people that took it, the entire field would literally give itself the nobel prize, take the million dollars and go to Hawaii for a month.
I mean it would be BREAKTHROUGH. If a protocol acheived a 70% remission rate (imagine 70% of lung cancers brought into remission) I think the whole field would turn their work over to robots programmed to dispense that protocol and never return from Hawaii. Heck, oncologists could probably buy Hawaii.
No one would be talking about placebo effects (wouldn't care).
I know it is hard to see big picture when you are sick, but the advances in psychopharmacology over the past 50 years IMO have been amazing.
50 years ago it was thorazine and the benzos and a sprinkling of other terrible meds, now we have hundreds from which to choose. Is it perfect? Absolutely not, is it better? I think so.
Also, it is becoming readily apparent that depression, bipolar disorder etc... are very very complex illnesses. Like cancer, they are most likely mutligenic in origin and highly individual to the person. These kinds of illnesses are very difficult to treat in the landscape of medicine today. We are used to treating one illness with one drug and that's that (think anti-biotics). Where we are now, both in cancer and psychiatry, is really still in the infancy of treating and curing these disorders.
IMO there is hope. It's not there yet, but I do think it is coming. Look where we've been and where we are now.
poster:seldomseen
thread:804126
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080105/msgs/804661.html