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Having read the book, this review I would say is very misrepresentative. The actual book is very good and a definite read. But this article seems to have spun it into a conspiracy theory. This is the opposite of why I liked the book in the first place, it explains how bad(For consumers) things happen due to systems not conspiracies. Also how things are not bad, just could be much better. Many examples are how mistake…
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> On the issue of efficiency of Prozac or similar drugs, sometimes the explanation is that they simply work and you know it if you have taken them. This is what people who take homeopathy say. It's what doctors and patients said about knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritus until they did a trial involving sham operations. When Prozac was introduced in the UK we were told that it made people "better than well", and…
Pain medication does work for quite a large number of conditions. Much of this has been demonstrated against a placebo or different treatments. If you give these drugs to animals in pain, they cease showing pain behavior. Just defining all effects of pain medication as placebo just isn't scientific at all. Placebos often don't work reliably and repeatable either...
When Goldacre talks about placebo he tends to talk about the pricing differences between differently packaged but identical medication. Thus, a brand name paracetamol is the same as an own-brand paracetamol and they're the same as a budget paracetamol. Yet one can be five or six times more expensive than the other. (Personally I don't see this as particularly bad behaviour.) I agree that he tends to place too much emphasis on placebo, but then I haven't read the studies. There are strong psychological aspects to pain; pain in cancer patients can be helped with cognitive behaviour therapy; some people (40% in one (not very good) report) with long term pain reported relief when they took a placebo.
But also look at coproxamol. This is an old med. we used to think that mixing meds meant you could use smaller quanties of active ingredients. Coproxamol is a sub-therapeutic dose of paracetamol and a dangerous toxic opiod (opiate?) dextropropoxyphene. (Paracetamol in acute overdose is very dangerous so for the dextropropoxyphene to be the more worrying ingredient tells us something). We've known since at least the 1980s that this med is not particularly effective and is very risky, yet it has only just been withdrawn from general use in the UK. We knew that it was less effective than paracetamol alone (because you'd take that at an effective dose) but that it was far more dangerous and that evidence got stronger through the 1990s and 2000s. (An overdose of paracetamol is treatable if caught in time, although paracetamol overdose does kill many people each year. An overdose of coproxamol is usually fatal before help arrives. For a time coproxamol was the leading medication in fatal overdoses.) Removal of this med was fiercely fought for years by pharmaceutical companies and by patient advocacy groups (sometimes funded by those same companies).
That is sleazy behaviour.
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>On the issue of efficiency of Prozac or similar drugs, sometimes the explanation is that they simply work and you know it if you have taken them. I hear the same thing about the power of prayer and Reiki.
Turns out, medication tends to work with much more people than prayer or Reiki... Drugs seem to work much more reliably.
It is exactly this kind of thinking that pharmaceutical companies are exploiting when they hide results from trials.
That's a review? There's almost no criticism, or even considered discussion, of the book at all . He's just copied and pasted sections that he thinks are important or interesting, and called it a day. Not that there's anything wrong with quoting sections of a work that you think are worthy of spreading to a wider audience (assuming proper attribution), but IMNSHO it's a bit disingenuous to call QFTing a "review". (FW…
I don't think the purpose was really to review it. I think he was using this as an opportunity to publicize the book and the issues it raises. People generally do that when they agree with the contents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the issue of efficiency of Prozac or similar drugs, sometimes the explanation is that they simply work and you know it if you have taken them. This is what people who take homeopathy say. It's what doctors and patients said about knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritus until they did a trial involving sham operations. When Prozac was introduced in the UK we were told that it made people "better than well", and…
Pain medication does work for quite a large number of conditions. Much of this has been demonstrated against a placebo or different treatments. If you give these drugs to animals in pain, they cease showing pain behavior. Just defining all effects of pain medication as placebo just isn't scientific at all. Placebos often don't work reliably and repeatable either...
He talked about Prozac and about homeopathy.
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Greenspun did a good job of characterizing (even summarizing) the information that you can find in the book. I learned new things from reading his review. Since I didn't read the book, this was more valuable to me than a "discussion".
How do you know he did a good job if you didn't read the book?
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I don't think the purpose was really to review it. I think he was using this as an opportunity to publicize the book and the issues it raises. People generally do that when they agree with the contents.
No, he writes what he thinks; as a longtime reader of PG's blog I've not noticed any agenda. He's also been reading Piketty's Capital and tearing P's thesis to bits.
Not without a book of comparable size and research time invested.
Having read the book, this review I would say is very misrepresentative. The actual book is very good and a definite read. But this article seems to have spun it into a conspiracy theory. This is the opposite of why I liked the book in the first place, it explains how bad(For consumers) things happen due to systems not conspiracies. Also how things are not bad, just could be much better. Many examples are how mistake…
People could actually afford 1970s medicine, so it's rather a moot point, no?
The problem you speak of is unique to the USA's backwards healthcare system that costs more for worse healthcare.
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No, he writes what he thinks; as a longtime reader of PG's blog I've not noticed any agenda. He's also been reading Piketty's Capital and tearing P's thesis to bits.
I very much doubt anyone can tear Piketty to bits. At all. Not without a book of comparable size and research time invested.