Placebos used in thousands of clinical trials conducted over the last few decades may have compromised study results, rendering the studies scientifically invalid.
A placebo is a supposedly inert substance given to a group of participants in a clinical drug trial so that the drug’s effects in a group of participants can be compared to a group of participants who did not get the drug. The word “placebo” is from Latin, literally “I shall be acceptable or pleasing,” from placere “to please.”
In a paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine [“What’s in Placebos: Who Knows? Analysis of Randomized, Controlled Trials” October 19, 2010 vol. 153 no. 8 532-535] it is revealed that no regulations govern placebo composition, and the composition of placebos can influence trial outcomes.
It was found that the composition of placebos was seldom described in randomized, controlled trials of pills or capsules. Because the nature of the placebo can influence trial outcomes, placebo formulation should be disclosed in reports of placebo-controlled trials.
Sometimes placebos are described as sugar pills. Well, we all know how sugar can influence behavior. One example: in a trial involving AIDS patients the researchers used placebos containing lactose. AIDS patients tend to be lactose intolerant. Since the trial is hoping for a drug that works better than a placebo, if the placebo happens to influence a worse outcome, then that may make the drug look better.
Some studies are now showing that some psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos. One recent study stated that, “The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo … may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.”
Another article said, “[The benefit of antidepressants] is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill — a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.”
If you are taking these drugs, do not stop taking them based on what you read here. You could suffer serious withdrawal symptoms. You should seek the advice and help of a competent medical doctor or practitioner before trying to come off any psychiatric drug.
The real problem, however, is that psychiatrists, and now non-psychiatric doctors, are fraudulently diagnosing life’s problems as an “illness,” stigmatizing unwanted behavior or study problems as “disease,” and prescribing harmful and addictive psychoactive drugs as so-called “treatment” when they know that their own studies show that these drugs are no more effective than a placebo.
Psychiatry’s stigmatizing labels, programs and treatments are harmful junk science; their diagnoses of “mental disorders” are a hoax — unscientific, fraudulent and harmful. All psychiatric treatments, not just psychiatric drugs, are dangerous.
Click here for more information about the alternatives to psychiatric drugging.
