The drugs don't work

[hirez]

... Or at least, they're just papering over the cracks, rather than actually fixing something.

However, if Serotonin theory doesn't hold up, does that mean the scare stories about MDMA leaching the stuff away are as reliable as the folklore about LSD and chromosome damage?

Comments

[bogwitch64]

See! This is what I've been saying ever since the first time someone suggested my son needed to be medicated! I'm NOT crazy! Well, that's not entirely true, but at least I'm not alone in thinking that these 'brain levelling' drugs aren't doing anything more than masking symptoms.

Ok, at this point in time it's what the medical field can do for people who can't seem to control panic or psychotic behavior, but it's a plaster bandage on a belly wound. All these kids taking drugs for 'attention disorders' and such need techniques, not mind altering chemicals!

Ok, off my soapbox. Thanks for posting that link. I sent it to my son (who's now 23 and willingly back on medication though against his wishes) and to my son-in-law, who also wavers back and forth as to how he feels about medicating himself.

[bogwitch64]

Let me also go on record as saying that I am not totally against such medications. There are instances where, while it might not actually level out this or counter that, it actually helps the patient to function, to feel better, and to all-around feel happier. My problem is with the automatic medicating of so many (especially YOUNG) people even when there are serious side effects. There HAS to be a happy medium where not everyone is automatically pegged as circular and then shoved into a square hole.

[steer]

They test the drugs not by measuring seratonin levels but by comparing the improvement in the patient measured against placebo on standardised "wellness scales".

That's the thing about Evidence Based Medicine, it does not matter a jot whether the theory behind it is Activated Water, Seratonin Level or Space Pixies. What matters and what is measured is "is this thing better or worse than a sugar pill and a pat on the head".

Certainly a theoretical underpinning helps at the drug design stage.

[perlmonger]

Aye, and that switches the question to the validity of "wellness scales", who defines them, and to what ends. I'm not suggesting there's any serious problem with them (in the UK, in 2009), but there's no way on Earth that they can be value- (or politics-) free.

[steer]

Possibly you could question the wellness scale but I don't think that's a particularly fruitful line of inquiry. A questionnaire based wellness scale would have to be pretty strangely broken to have an ineffective anti-depressant work better than placebo in a double blind test. (The amount they work better than placebo is not too much in some cases mind).

However, to my mind at least, what's much more likely is that they do "work" to the degree the tests show them to work but that the pop-science "seratonin makes you happy" explanation the original article criticises is to some degree wrong. I have no idea to what degree drug companies and researchers in the field believe that model -- my suspicion is "not at all".

Incoherent rambling follows

[inulro]

I can't even read articles like that. I take the psychoactive substances because they make me get sleep and relieve my pain. I know they don't touch the source of the problem (medical science still not so hot on the sleep disorders and pain issues), but they make me a functional human being, and that's all I care about.

Re: Incoherent rambling follows

[hirez]

Yes. And I sometimes take small doses of a drug which is no longer prescribed as heart medication because it makes the anxiety go away. Which appears to work by sticking an oar in the feedback loop, so there's one small part of me desperately trying to have a complete meltdown while the rest is going "Can you hear something? Nah, must be a shagged bearing in yer superego. Anyway, who's round is it?"

Re: Incoherent rambling follows

[inulro]

I remember that. It's an odd sensation. "oh look, I've found another way we're open to being sued, and it's not that I don't care, but I can't panic about it either".

Also, on reflection, there's other medical conditions where the symptoms rather than the cause are treated, yet nobody suggests we should throw away the pills we take for those...