Antidepressants and Suicide: Defending Prozac

It amazes me how many research scientists seem to have flunked statistics.  Or ought to have.  Me, I majored in the liberal arts.  But at Reed, even those who took Science for Poets would be required to rewrite some of the scientific papers I have read on the subject of antidepressants.

So the vocabulary terms for the week are observer bias and confounding variables.  No worries -- lots of pictures.

Clinical Experience in Defense of Prozac

Let's say you are a doctor treating 100 patients with severe depression.  You give them all antidepressants.  It seems irresponsible not to, doesn't it.  Thirty of them get better.  Fifteen do not make a follow-up appointment.  You switch the fifty-five who are still trying to another antidepressant.  Another fifteen get better.  And another fifteen do not make a follow-up appointment.

Over the course of a year, you get up to fifty whose depression is remission and ten who are still struggling.  You don't know what happened with the forty who are no longer seeing you. They couldn't afford treatment; they didn't like your face; they couldn't find parking; they got worse on your medication. You have no idea.  But you have fifty patients who think you saved their lives.  You feel pretty good about yourself, don't you.

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