Tag Archives: Eli Lilly

What Benefit? Antidepressants & The Placebo Effect—60 Minutes Exposes the Facts

We all know about the placebo effect. But a Harvard Medical School professor has applied the same theory to antidepressants and his findings are likely to rile drugmakers. Why? He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain unpublished clinical trial data and found that, when combining results with published data, the various antidepressants were no better than dummy pills.

“These are the studies that show no benefit of the antidepressant over the placebo. What they did was they took more successful studies – they published most of them – and they took their unsuccessful studies, and they didn’t publish that…. If they were mildly or moderately depressed, you don’t see a difference at all. The only place where you get a clinically meaningful difference is at these very extreme levels of depression,” Irving Kirsch tells 60 Minutes.

4 Creepy Ways Big Pharma Peddles its Drugs

It’s no secret that advertising works. Big Pharma wouldn’t spend over $4 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising if it didn’t mean massive profits.

What is more unknown is why drug ads that sow hypochondria, raise health fears and “sell” diseases are often the most common–and effective–even when the drugs themselves are of questionable safety.

The nation’s fourth most frequent drug ads in 2009 for were Cymbalta, making Eli Lilly $3.1 billion in one year, despite the antidepressant’s links to liver problems and suicide. Pfizer spent $157 million advertising Lyrica for fibromyalgia in 2009, despite the seizure pill’s links to life-threatening allergic reactions. The same year, it spent $107 million advertising the antidepressant Pristiq, even though it also had links to liver problems.

Study: Antidepressants actually cause many people to have worse depression

(NaturalNews) A recent industry-funded study on antidepressant drugs has revealed that the medications can cause roughly 20 percent of patients to get worse depression symptoms than if they simply took nothing. Published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, the study, which was largely controlled by drug giant Eli Lilly, is an eye-opener for those who still put their faith in antidepressants like Cymbalta (duloxetine), which carry with them life-altering side effects.

Ralitza Gueorguieva, lead author of the study from the Yale University School of Health, and her colleagues conducted trials on 2,500 people, all of whom were given either Cymbalta, various other antidepressant drugs, or a drug-free placebo for two months. At the conclusion of the study, most of those who received the placebo saw a gradual improvement in their depression symptoms, while nearly 20 percent of those taking antidepressants saw a worsening of their symptoms.