The maker of Zoloft is being sued in an unusual case alleging the popular antidepressant has no more benefit than a dummy pill and that patients who took it should be reimbursed for their costs.
Watchers of a February broadcast of “60 Minutes” may have been stunned to learn that studies have been conducted that seem to prove that antidepressants, on the whole, are no more effective than placebo.
This revelation about antidepressants – among the top-selling and top-prescribed drugs in the United States – may have been new news to some, but the studies conducted by Irving Kirsch, PhD, and colleagues, have been raising eyebrows and garnering attention since 1998. Which begs the question, have Kirsch’s studies had any impact on the sales of antidepressants and/or on the prescribing patterns of doctors?
Here in the States, where pharmaceuticals are advertised in newspapers and magazines, radio, and especially TV, anyone seeing happy actors proclaiming how and an anti-depressant changed their lives can almost demand that drug from even a primary care physician, and usually get it.
A limited hangout is intelligence spook speak for letting out just enough information to appease investigations or grass roots suspicions. But only part of the picture is revealed, not the whole big picture…CBS did not reveal the horrible side effects from anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs. They did interview a British medical official who was part of a UK commission that banned anti-depressant use on mild to moderately depressed patients.Even Medscape lists these side effects from SSRI and SNRI anti-depressants: Abnormal bleeding, hepatitis, headache, hyponatrenia (potentially deadly low sodium), toxic epidermal necrolysis (potentially deadly skin death), impotence, abnormal sensations, mania and suicide.
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 He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain unpublished clinical trial data and found that, when combining results with published data, the various antidepressants were no better than dummy pills.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.
(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.