One More Nail In The Coffin
A New York Times editorial echoes our decade old refrain: "We've long feared that the integrity of medical research is being eroded by conflicts of interest and manipulation of scientific data." In sharp contrast, we bring to your attention an important editorial by Dr. Nassir Ghaemi in the American Journal of Psychiatry (March 2008). Though Dr. Ghaemi has received funding from drug manufacturers, he pulls no punches about the adverse effects of antidepressants.
Vera Hassner Sharav, AHRP
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As Dr. Yunus says, doctors manipulate the data to say what they want it to say.
The best experience I've had with any anti-depressant was the one I could say had no effect whatsoever, positive or negative. Most of them simply made me sicker. It wasn't the drug I needed, but it was what the doctor wanted to prescribe -- it was easier for him to slap a "depression" label on me than to accept that a specialist had called it CFS and read up on what to do for that. You spend a lot of the day in bed, you must be depressed, NEXT!
It's been said that the reason doctors don't like to deal with CFS patients is because it's too difficult for them to deal with someone who doesn't get well. However, enough of us have improved with proper treatment that I don't buy that. No, I will never be "cured", but with the right medication, I could've gotten back to work in a couple months. I'd done it before; I intend to do it again.
The real problem is, CFS is an enigma and will challenge everything you've learned about disease and medication (many patients have the opposite reaction to pills -- I've more than once been awake all night after taking a sleeping pill, and fallen asleep minutes after taking a handful of No-Doz). It requires more "thinking outside the box" than most doctors are willing to do. Much easier to slap an inaccurate psych diagnosis on the patient, hustle her out the door, and hope that you offended her enough that she'll go inflict herself on another doctor.
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