Weekend reading…have a good one.
- Recovery from “schizophrenia” and other “psychotic disorders” » New Evidence That Long Term Reliance On Antipsychotic Medication May Impair Recovery — Many of you have probably been aware of two prior World Health Organization (WHO) studies that showed almost twice the recovery rates from “schizophrenia” in developing countries as in developed countries. While critics of current psychiatric practice attributed the better outcome in developing countries to the fact that most were not on medication, others suggested that cultural factors were mostly responsible for the better outcomes.–A new study though, that looked only at people on medication in a wide variety of countries, found little difference in outcome between developing and developed countries. (for a piece of text about the WHO studies see here)
- Child care study: Time spent at day care is linked to behavior – latimes.com — Since its inception in 1991, the largest and longest-running study of American child-care has generated plenty of controversial — and to many working parents, infuriating — conclusions about the effects on kids of early care outside the family.—The latest findings of the federally funded Early Child Care Research Network are certain to be no exception. At age 15, according to a study being published Friday in the journal Child Development, those who spent long hours in day care as preschoolers are more impulsive and more prone to take risks than are teens whose toddler years were spent largely at home.
- Companies Dodge $60 Billion in Taxes Even Tea Party Condemns – Bloomberg.com —While Forest Laboratories Inc., the medicine’s maker, sells Lexapro only in the U.S., the voyage ensures most of its profits aren’t taxed there — and they face little tax anywhere else. Forest cut its U.S. tax bill by more than a third last year with a technique known as transfer pricing, a method that carves an estimated $60 billion a year from the U.S. Treasury as it combines tax planning and alchemy.
- Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry: A Closer Look: Eli Lilly: Our Drug Failed, So it Has Serious Potential — The good news for Lilly is that most people who claim to “read journal articles” really just browse the abstract without actually looking at the full text of the paper. For the select few who have nothing better to do than read Lilly propaganda, take a look at Table 2. A total of 12 secondary outcome measures are listed. The Lilly drug beat placebo on… ONE of them. Lilly doesn’t say much about how much better their drug was than placebo on the QIDS-SR measure beside throwing around that often meaningless term of “statistically significant.” People on the drug improved by 10.2 points whereas placebo patients improved 8.3 points. So about a 20% difference. If you bother to calculate an effect size, it is d = .24, which is quite small and clinically insignificant. So on the ONE measure where the drug was better than placebo, it was by a small margin, and it missed the mark on 11 other secondary measures as well as on the primary outcome measure. But “it may have antidepressant potential.” Hell yes, I’ve never been so exited about a new drug.
- Are Newman’s Own and Other Companies Misleading Consumers with the Word ‘Organic’? | Food | AlterNet — Some food companies have found a way to cast their processed foods as organic without going through the inconvenience of using certified organic ingredients in their products. By incorporating “organic” into their names, these companies have been able to display the magic word on the packaging of food products that are not in fact certified organic.
- The Voices of Thyroid Disease Thyroid problems are often missed and a psychiatric diagnosis is given New York Times — Thyroid problems are often overlooked and people get diagnosed with psychiatric conditions instead which leads them to taking drugs that will not address the cause of their issues and often make them sicker.