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Feb 27, 2012, 07:30 PM
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Member Since: Feb 2011
Location: Antarctica
Posts: 2,164
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http://www.dana.org/news/features/de....aspx?id=35506
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Mainstream scientists, however, have and continue to understand the same data as showing that antidepressants work well for at least 20 percent of patients on an initial trial. The scientific dilemma is to separate patients who really need a drug from those who will respond to placebo. In the future this should be possible as the field develops better laboratory tests for measuring relevant brain function. In the meantime, the challenge for doctor and patient is the same as for the scientist – to make as good a decision as possible about whether or not to use an antidepressant in each situation without a laboratory test for guidance.
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From a comment:
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First, Drs Potter and Paul state that antidepressants (AD’s) work for “at least 20% of patients on an initial trial”. The challenge is to “separate patients who really need a drug from those who will respond to placebo”. This means that some part of this 20% is placebo response. Probably 30-50% in an average trial is placebo, according to Drs Potter and Paul. This means that the actual non-placebo responders are less than 20%--so, by implication closer to 10-15% of the people given an anti-depressant in an initial trial are non-placebo responders, meaning they are responding to the drug, not the placebo effect. That is a pretty small slice. There are ways of improving this number (therapy, thyroid augmentation, multiple drugs), but clearly the drugs are missing the mark for most of the people most of the time.
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Just food for thought. 
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