Psych Drug Shocker: Antidepressant Drugs Work No Better than Placebo; Big Pharma Hoax Finally Exposed

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(NaturalNews) The following is a groundbreaking report from the independent, honest medical journal PLoS Medicine (which accepts no advertising money from Big Pharma). The full study, with sources and attributions, can be found at http://medicine.plosjournals.org/pe...

This study is sending shockwaves through the medical community. It finally reveals the Big Pharma hoax behind antidepressant drugs. Through fraudulent science and clever marketing, drug companies have managed to take a drug that works no better than placebo and turn it into a multi-billion dollar scam. But the truth is finally out: Taking Prozac is no more effective than taking a sugar pill! Hundreds of millions of consumers have been fooled by the quack science supporting modern pharmaceutical medicine. Read the study details below...

Editor's Summary:

Everyone feels miserable occasionally. But for some people -- those with depression -- these sad feelings last for months or years and interfere with daily life. Depression is a serious medical illness caused by imbalances in the brain chemicals that regulate mood. It affects one in six people at some time during their life, making them feel hopeless, worthless, unmotivated, even suicidal. Doctors measure the severity of depression using the "Hamilton Rating Scale of Depression" (HRSD), a 17–21 item questionnaire. The answers to each question are given a score and a total score for the questionnaire of more than 18 indicates severe depression. Mild depression is often treated with psychotherapy or talk therapy (for example, cognitive–behavioral therapy helps people to change negative ways of thinking and behaving). For more severe depression, current treatment is usually a combination of psychotherapy and an antidepressant drug, which is hypothesized to normalize the brain chemicals that affect mood. Antidepressants include "tricyclics," "monoamine oxidases," and "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors" (SSRIs). SSRIs are the newest antidepressants and include fluoxetine, venlafaxine, nefazodone, and paroxetine.

Why Was This Study Done?

Although the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), and other licensing authorities have approved SSRIs for the treatment of depression, some doubts remain about their clinical efficacy. Before an antidepressant is approved for use in patients, it must undergo clinical trials that compare its ability to improve the HRSD scores of patients with that of a placebo, a dummy tablet that contains no drug. Each individual trial provides some information about the new drug's effectiveness but additional information can be gained by combining the results of all the trials in a "meta-analysis," a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. A previously published meta-analysis of the published and unpublished trials on SSRIs submitted to the FDA during licensing has indicated that these drugs have only a marginal clinical benefit. On average, the SSRIs improved the HRSD score of patients by 1.8 points more than the placebo, whereas NICE has defined a significant clinical benefit for antidepressants as a drug–placebo difference in the improvement of the HRSD score of 3 points. However, average improvement scores may obscure beneficial effects between different groups of patient, so in the meta-analysis in this paper, the researchers investigated whether the baseline severity of depression affects antidepressant efficacy.

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