Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

You could probably swap "antidepressants" for any number of drugs and it's still a true statement.

I think antidepressants are getting the spotlight because some (many) were approved with only a slim <10% improvement over a placebo... I think the same could be said about the congestion medication phenylephrine [1] (edit: added specific drug name. edit 2: added link)

I get the feeling that drug approval laxed for a good while and let these slip through

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17264159/

I'm not sure how universal this is, but for me, phenylephrine is literally just side effects. It still makes my anxiety worse, but does nothing for my congestion.

Without knowing the exact approval history in the US, I doubt that it is a lax approval process as much as it is an absence of better alternatives.

There are not really any known effective clinical interventions (be they in the form of medicine, therapy, or things like more exercise), and a 10% improvement is better than nothing (clinical therapy (notably Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is generally believed to be more effective but not by that much and it is financially out of reach for many people who are able to afford medication).

More on this from Derek Lowe of Things I Won’t Work With fame:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-phenyl...

Correct, and also, antidepressants are used for more reasons that to remedy depression (though that may well be their primary purpose). E.g. I use them to combat GAD, though it stems from ASD.

For most other drugs the effectiveness is openly disclosed to patents. Also most other drugs have fewer, rarer, less severe side effects. And most other drugs can be stopped and started much more easily...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com