items of interest

with contributions from Gary Greenberg, Kim Mulford, George A. Burn

"As It Would Hardly Help drug sales, pharmaceutical companies don't publish unsuccessful trials, so University of Connecticut psychology professor Irving Kirsch and his co-authors used the Freedom of Information Act to extract the data from the FDA. What they found has led them, and other researchers who've investigated antidepressants' relatively poor showing against placebos, to conclude that millions of people may be spending billions of dollars on medicines that owe their popularity as much to clever marketing as to chemistry, and suffering serious side effects—not to mention becoming dependent on drugs for healing they might be able to do without them—in the bargain....

"To rule out the possibility that patients are recovering because of faith or a good sales pitch, and to ensure that the drug works by virtue of its biochemical properties, the FDA has, since the late 1970s, required that all drugs be tested against placebos. Typically, between 35 and 45 percent of people given placebos improve."

Gary Greenberg
"Is it Prozac? Or Placebo?
Mother Jones
November/December 2003

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