Posted by linkadge on October 2, 2010, at 21:04:10
In reply to Re: Experiment of own on SSRI's » linkadge, posted by bulldog2 on October 2, 2010, at 16:47:58
>There is large volume of people that rate some >drugs. I think that will give a better feeling >about a drug.
Large volume doesn't mean anything. The key here is that for any degree of accuracy, patients must be sampled randomly. If you do go to ask patient, you will notice a few things. For one, there is a relative absense of reports from 3-6 month range. This indicates that a large majority of patients don't make it past the first few weeks on the drug.
In other words, although the sample is large, its not really representitive due to the fact that there is a relative absense of the very group of people who would give a negative report (i.e. the people who stop taking it!!)
>Not scientific and not accurate.
Nothing is scientific and accurate! As I was saying above, the only scientific and accurate way to tell whether the medication actually works (better than placebo) is with a double blind placebo controlled study. We do have those, but they don't really support your viewpoint too well. Other than double blind, placebo controlled studies, its really just speculation.
Self reports are not scientific. For example, sure people might give lexapro a rating of 3.4 out of 4, but what if a population (the same size) was given a placebo? What if the rating of the placebo was 3.3? All of a sudden lexapro doesn't look so great. Perhaps the only reason lexapro is rated higher than other SSRIs is because its the "drug du jour" and the fact that it generally is more tollerable than other SSRIs.
Linkadge
poster:linkadge
thread:964395
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20100926/msgs/964535.html