Posted by baseball55 on September 23, 2015, at 19:53:04
In reply to Re: Young people on SSRI's commit more crimes?, posted by hello321 on September 22, 2015, at 21:58:43
> In the sense that you say corellation is not causation, then how can you be sure any medical treatment you've taken or had done has helped you in any way with its effects. There are other reasons you could have improved. There are other reasons you could have suddenly gained weight while on an AAP, even if the weight gain stopped or even went away after you stopped taking it. Right?
> In that sense a most of the experiences on meds written all over the internet could just be mistaken thoughts.Yes, but I am far from the only person who experienced this and placebo-controlled, double-blinded, replicated studies have found weight gain to be a side-effect of AAPs. Does this correlation equal causation? Well, given that the mechanism is not understood, it's impossible to "prove" causation. But there are well-established rules in scientific research to claim causation. For example, we don't know the mechanism by which smoking causes lung disease. We can speculate, but the fact remains that some smokers never suffer from lung disease. Does this mean smoking does not cause lung disease? Large scale comparisons of smokers and non-smokers, replicated again and again and again, find strong correlations. So it is now widely accepted that smoking causes lung disease, even if the exact mechanism (which could prove causality) is unknown.
Other examples in chemistry, physics, biology abound. We don't know, for example, that human characteristics evolved over millennia. It can't be proven. It is a theory. But it is a theory that has been confirmed by evidence again and again and again and has not been falsified by other evidence. So it is now accepted that evolutionary processes led to the development of homo sapiens.
poster:baseball55
thread:1082509
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20150901/msgs/1082868.html