Links from over the weekend and the last couple of days:
- Irving Kirsch, P.h.D: Antidepressants: The Emperor’s New Drugs?— My awareness that the chemical cure of depression is a myth began in 1998, when Guy Sapirstein and I set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Instead of doing a brand new study, we decided to pool the results of previous studies in which placebos had been used to treat depression and analyze them together. What we did is called a meta-analysis, and it is a common technique for making sense of the data when a large number of studies have been done to answer a particular question.
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- Doctors cautioned on Zyprexa for adolescents | Los Angeles Times — The Federal Drug Administration on Friday issued a warning to doctors that adolescents taking the drug olanzapine have an “increased potential” — in comparison with adults taking the new-generation antipsychotic drug — for weight gain and metabolic disturbances that could result in diabetes or elevated blood cholesterol levels. (god knows I’ve seen hundreds of adults gain 100+ lbs in as little as a year, so what does this mean? and why don’t they warn EVERYONE)
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- Clinical trial research driven by marketing, not evidence — What’s worthwhile about the article in Bioethical Inquiry is that it makes very clear how widespread this practice of “marketing-based medicine” is and how unreliable our so-called “gold standard” of medical research — randomized clinical trials — really is. In too many cases, drug companies, which fund these trials and cherrypick the researchers whose names appear on them, not only ghostwrite the results to hide negative data and overstate the positive. But they also make sure that any truly negative trials never see the light of day. And then once the misleading results are published in supposedly reputable journals, the drug companies use prominent physicians (on their payroll) to market the hell out of them.
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- Pain and sensory management through mindfulness, Part 1 — Urocyon — A while back, I mentioned ordering in and reading Shinzen Young’s Break Through Pain. His central thesis is important here: “What people call “pain” is actually a combination of pain and resistance…The distortion in perception and behavior can be a big part of the horror of the pain” also expressed as “suffering equals pain multiplied by resistance”…Just by applying basic mindfulness, I had already started using pretty much all the techniques he suggests. (Along with some others; going into what has worked will probably turn this into a multi-part post.) This book would be a pretty good introduction for people who need more of an introduction to mindfulness, and he emphasizes that these are techniques which work, without depending on any specific belief system. I like Shinzen Young’s work, anyway, for a lot of the same reasons C4Chaosexpresses. He also strikes me as geeky in a very good way.
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- Toward a Mindful Society — interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn, Shambala Sun — As creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn has brought the benefits of meditation practice to hundreds of thousands of people and inspired a movement that is changing our society in many ways. In this exclusive interview with the Sun’s Barry Boyce, he discusses the philosophy, goals, and promise of the mindfulness movement.
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- Genetically modified seeds ‘are everywhere’ — NewScientist– thanks Monsanto
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- Meditation? Medication? Examiner.com — Studies demonstrate that mindfulness meditation is taking a place on the nonpharmacologic shelf.