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Originally Posted by Pond, James Pond
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Originally Posted by tyme
This is entirely the problem. In the sample size for blind studies, there are simply not enough adverse effects to ever be statistically significant.
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Not so.
A few year back Pfizer were in the process of testing a potential hypertension medication called Sildenafil citrate. There were side effects reported in statistically high enough numbers from their patient population to warrant re-evaluation of the drug.
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Obviously -- okay maybe not so obviously, but nevertheless I promise -- I'm not that stupid. Yes, there are lots of drug side effects that are statistically significant.
What I meant was, if you look at certain of these anti-depressant/ADHD drugs, and you look at potential negative
behaviors like suicides, murders, mass-murders, even if you assume that every known instance of those behaviors carried out by people prescribed those medications, they're still rare. Rare enough that if you go back and conduct blind trials with typical sample sizes, even looking specifically for those consequences, you're probably going to have trouble proving with p<.05 that any such events occurring in the trials are caused by the drugs, at least without recruiting lots and lots of people for the blind trials. And then ethics problems appear. Ethics may dictate shutting down blind trials before you get p<.05.
At what point do you say that, although other factors clearly are involved, certain drugs increase the risk of suicide, murder, or mass murder, and they increase that risk in a way that the medical establishment can't predict or prevent? Do you never say that, because there are other factors?
Vanya, going back to your depressive example, what if human/primate evolution specifically selected for people to get depressed when they felt enough social pressure so that they wouldn't get violent? Early tribes probably didn't like it when someone went berserk with a club, so they exiled them, from the tribe and from the gene pool. If that selected for depressive behavior and lack of focus under stress, and if that's what's seen in adolescents in modern society, and we're trying to counter that with medication, then these rare but vivid and horrific events should be no surprise.