Posted by metric on May 13, 2009, at 12:07:04
In reply to Re: Antidepressants Hardly Help ( Time Magazine), posted by Larry Hoover on May 11, 2009, at 8:12:22
> I'm sorry, but that Kirsch et al study is complete garbage. I offered a detailed critique of it here: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20080221/msgs/815551.html
>
> There were other significant criticisms that ended up in other posts, but this was my main set of issues with it.
>
> I really wish this man would go away. He gives a bad name to cherry-pickers. (Cherry-picking is the act of mining statistics for the rare examples that support an argument that is contradicted by the body of the evidence.)The drug industry is also guilty of cherry-picking (negative results are seldom published for reasons not necessarily linked to financial disincentives as well), which has been a major source of controversy. There was a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year pertaining to publication bias in antidepressant trials:
Turner EH, Matthews AM, Linardatos E, Tell RA, Rosenthal R. "Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trials and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy." N Engl J Med. 2008 Jan 17;358(3):252-260.
I'm willing to send you the full paper (PDF) if you're interested.
poster:metric
thread:895119
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20090505/msgs/895537.html