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Medications that change who we are

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Re: Medications that change who we are

#111

Post by cassowary37 »

aphextron wrote: post #32

>"It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains." I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals - your brain is your body. It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. People think they can take an a…

>"I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals"

Hmm. Modern psychiatry is usually accused of the opposite. Also interesting that leading comment on an article about how many (non-CNS) meds have CNS effects becomes yet another opportunity to criticize antidepressants. HN community's hostility to treating brain diseases (while emphatically supporting people with brain diseases) is perplexing.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#112

Post by goblin89 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #41
goblin89 wrote: post #14

Tangentially (and anecdotally), not long ago I seem to have contracted what seems like a flu (or the like), and I remember feeling very healthy, social and unusually well—almost high—most of the day right until my brain went foggy and fever started. In hindsight, I did not behave quite like myself that day, especially considering I felt somewhat overworked the preceding week. This prompted me to first draw the analog…

> This prompted me to first draw the analogy with taking and withdrawing from a substance The substance has no goals. The flu specifically wants you to be social.

The action of taking the former is probably in alignment with some goals (even if potentially short-sighted), while contracting the latter alters your behavior so that it can spread more widely in accordance with the goals of its own DNA.

But yeah, I didn’t think my analogy through further than surface symptoms.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#113

Post by anthony_doan »

spodek wrote: post #51

Let's also consider the other direction -- how fresh vegetables and fruit, plus whole grains, beans, nuts, seeds, and herbs improve mood, behavior, resilience. Throw in some vigorous exercise, and for most people, drugs can't do better, without the drugs' side effects and cost. For many people, switching from a standard American diet to largely those ingredients would register as changing who they are. I just finishe…

You're advocating between drugs and the alternative you listed.

The problem is the alternative you've listed are usually for prevention not as a cure. At least all the papers I've seen are observational and retrospective. Drugs on the other hand are design experiment, clinical and casual.

You don't cure cancer with exercise and good diet.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#114

Post by dpark »

dragonwriter wrote: post #106
dpark wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. Except it is. The brain is a part of your body and the two are tightly integrated. Yet the brain is also not simply another organ. If you lose half of your liver, your personality might change due to the trauma, but you will still be you. If you lose a kidney, you’ll live on as if littl…

> If you lose half your brain, you’re probably dead, and if not, you’ll be drastically impaired the rest of your life. You’ll also likely experience drastic personality changes. That's...not at all what the actual results of a hemispherectomy, in which you literally lose half of your brain, show.

That’s rarely performed on adults because the risks are so high. Even in children it’s a last resort reserved only for the most severe and morphine seizure cases.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#116

Post by doitLP »

Mistletoe wrote: post #79

I had never heard of this link between statins and aggression and Tylenol and lack of empathy before. Interesting. Maybe this is why Boomers act so strange now. “Former flower children lost their empathy and caring for the world and the next generation when their doctors put them all on statins and they started gobbling Tylenol” would be quite an interesting story. Both my parents are on statins, it seems every perso…

Have them ask their doctor about the NNT of statins (number needed to treat). Statins reduce cholesterol, and boy do they do a good job. But what are the outcomes? Despite the hypothesis, Lowered cholesterol does not really reduce your chances for a heart attack (NNT 217) or stroke (NNT > 300). Which means 217 have to take the drug for 3 years for 1 person to avoid a non fatal heart attack!

Most of those statin studies were done on men. There is growing evidence for women but for decades it was almost non existent.

One of the problems with the Pharmaceutical industry is how long term effects/safety data are never available until decades later, after the industry has heavily pushed the drug On doctors and patients and made a ton of money. I’m not saying it is necessarily nefarious, just that the incentives are misaligned for positive patient outcomes. All patients should be aware of that.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#117

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

kerkeslager wrote: post #89
ezequiel-garzon wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body . Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. Moreover, doesn’t the notion of reincarnation in some parts of the Eastern world show it’s not restricted to Western culture? I’m sure there plenty more…

> Some people feel one’s essence is fundamentally different from one’s body, including the brain as part of the body. Not saying I support this notion, but to brush it aside as stupid or unjustified seems a bit hasty in view of the huge literature behind these issues. I don't think it is. Consider: someone decides to say something without evidence. It's obviously okay to brush this aside and just say "there's no evid…

What's the evidence that there is a brain or body in the first place, which is a big part of the original discussion? No, I don't mean that just because Plato said it cannot be "stupid", but you have clearly provoked the crowd bringing philosophy to the fore, and broadly speaking philosophy is where you stop having certain evidence for anything, as it precisely challenges anything deemed certain. Once the body is assumed and our senses trusted, if you find solid evidence it'll be about how the brain differs (or not) from the rest of the body, not about the presence or absence of a mind or soul.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#118

Post by m-i-l »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #46
goblin89 wrote: post #14

Tangentially (and anecdotally), not long ago I seem to have contracted what seems like a flu (or the like), and I remember feeling very healthy, social and unusually well—almost high—most of the day right until my brain went foggy and fever started. In hindsight, I did not behave quite like myself that day, especially considering I felt somewhat overworked the preceding week. This prompted me to first draw the analog…

Yeah I always feel fantastic the day before I get sick. I don’t have any sources, but I remember reading that it’s due to your immune system ramping up and getting ready to fight. Not sure how much truth there is to that, but every time I’m sick, I can look back and see I felt great the day before.

I've noticed exactly the same experience in recent years with common colds (which I've had slightly more often than normal thanks to young children). Like the parent post, the day before I feel "unusually well—almost high", and the next day the cold symptoms start, or I get a day of feeling especially unwell without any specific symptoms (the blearghs). Don't think I've read anything supporting this, but in my layperson's mind it is due to my immune system going into overdrive trying to fight the infection.

Re: Medications that change who we are

#119

Post by robbiep »

aphextron wrote: post #32

>"It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains." I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals - your brain is your body. It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. People think they can take an a…

The interesting bit here is that literally everything you do or eat affects this.

For example your diet is going to get broken down into micronutrients and for a lot of these molecules, while they are circulating, there are a lot of receptors that they are going to bind to and modify function on. And then there is exercise (or lack thereof) and all of the even-further away components (personal relationships, sleep etc) work on your brain and state of mind too.

When I was in Med school I came across this joke - apparently the effect size of antidepressants decreases with phase 3 trials, trending back to placebo. So the joke goes that as soon as a new antidepressant comes out, they need to use it before it stops working.

The deeper question here is whether the initial effect size was simply due to chance, and so the effect size of antidepressants is simply placebo and it was poor studies that let them get in the wild in the first place

Re: Medications that change who we are

#120

Post by jiofih »

truth_be_told wrote: post #4

I have long wondered about this. In the Asian world, traditional Systems of Medicine focus on "holistic" treatment and the general public often calls Western Medicine, "Allopathy with side-effects". I had intuitively felt that these medicines must have an overall effect on behaviour which may always not be obvious to the observer unless the difference between the before and after were stark and noticeable. We really…

You’re right, but I’m quite sure the “Asian world” doesn’t use that term, since homeopathy / allopathy / osteopathy are all western invented classifications.
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