comment by mk

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comment by mk

mk · 4601 days ago · link · · parent · post: Life in the Quiet Zone

>It's not even something that merits "further study." Any study you care to run will demonstrate that homeopathy does fuckall compared to placebo. Which is usually where people like me start saying "yeah, but 'placebo' doesn't mean 'nothing' so maybe what we should be doing is studying this here 'placebo effect' because if 'sham medicine' gives you even half the efficacy with none of the side effects, maybe we should start prescribing more 'sham medicine' as a first line of defense."

I won't light the match. :) Oddly some anti-depressants aren't significantly better than placebo, but they come with bonus side-effects. http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20080227/antidepress...

Somewhere I erroneously heard that prescription of placebo wasn't allowed in the US, but it seems that many doctors use it: http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/healthday/080103/almo...

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kleinbl00 · 4601 days ago · link ·

I spent 4 years dating a girl whose father, stepmother and grandfather were all practicing psychiatrists. Two of the three were Freudian. Two of the three worked in public health. And three of the three took a "shotgun approach" to antidepressants; you try one until it doesn't work, then you try another.

We're just getting started on a scientific understanding of mental health. The dark ages of mental health treatment weren't 300 years ago, 200 years ago or even 100 years ago; they were the decades between the rise of surgery and sulfa drugs and the discovery of thorazine (1930-1953). fMRI and the like have been really helpful in figuring out what, exactly, drugs do to the brain, but even then, it's a pretty pragmatic field.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Thorazine...