Placebo vs Meds: The fool's gold that heals

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Psi - 14 Jan 2006 02:46 GMT

Decoding Psychiatric Propaganda
http://groups.msn.com/psychbusters

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The fool's gold that heals

Drug companies are the most profitable businesses in the world - ever
seeking new diseases for which they can provide new 'miracle'
medicines. But the fact is, Jacky Law reports, a simple sugar pill can
often be just as effective

Jacky Law
Saturday January 14, 2006
Guardian, UK

You can get away with a lot in the medicines business, but there is one
basic requirement - a drug should do you some good. This has to be
proved in at least two controlled studies. These large-scale clinical
trials often cost millions of dollars and must consist of at least two
arms: one of people who are given the test drug and a second group who
act as a means of comparison.

This second group is given a placebo, a sugar pill with no powers other
than those evoked through the power of suggestion. The placebo effect
shows what the mind and body are capable of achieving in the absence of
real drugs but with the expectation of benefit. Potential participants
in a trial are filtered through various entry criteria such as age,
severity of disease and so on, and then selected at random. It can be
conducted in a single hospital or in a network of clinical centres
around the world. It can last weeks, months or years. The most
important thing is that neither doctor nor patient knows who is taking
the drug and who is not.

The placebo, despite containing no active ingredient, often proves a
surprisingly strong contender. Its performance in clinical trial after
clinical trial shows patients inherently possess vast amounts of
untapped healing power. They want to be well so much, their bodies
respond to the mere expectation that they will be.

These hopes are easily exploited by pharmaceutical companies when they
want to extend the reach of a drug, increasing the number of conditions
the single drug is used to treat. In this sense medicines are packaged
science. The package, or label, plus what the doctor tells them, is all
most people get to know of the drug and what its expected effects will
be.

Where some antidepressant drugs are concerned, the label can say almost
whatever you want it to say. It could be for painful periods, for
depression, to stop smoking, to become more engaged in the world, for
panic attacks, irritable bowels, incontinence, shyness - for virtually
anything that has some kind of anxiety at its root.

The active ingredient can be the same, but its effect will depend on
what it is being tested for. If it has been shown in a trial to treat
irritable bowels or help smoking cessation, and it has been approved by
the regulators for that indication, then that is what it will say on
the label. And the drugs work according to what the label says, what
the doctor says, and what we believe. Our minds and bodies respond, in
other words, to what we are told the drug will do. GlaxoSmithKline's
Zyban for giving up smoking, for example, is a long-acting form of
Wellbutrin for depression by another name. And the antidepressant,
Zispin, is also marketed for sleeping disorders, one of the top
symptoms in diagnosing depression. Many lifestyle drugs are prescribed
under a number of different names. Different studies are done to get
different licensing data to get them known as different drugs so they
can operate in different therapeutic markets.

What makes a smoker more likely to kick their habit on Zyban than on
the identical drug posing as an antidepressant is the fact that this is
what the doctor says, and what the data from clinical studies
corroborates.

Full article at
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1686011,00.html

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Decoding Psychiatric Propaganda
http://groups.msn.com/psychbusters