an incredibly important story. these drugs are overprescribed off-label not just in children, but also in the elderly. these were developed and approved for treating bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in otherwise healthy adults. the clinical trials did not include enough children or older adults to be considered to have sufficient power.

it should be said this class of drugs can be quite effective for treating the conditions for which they were originally approved.


also, that voice-over announcer needs a kick in the throat.

I don't think the video was suggesting there was a chemical involved, although I guess that would be an alternate explanation, alongside the usual placebo effects etc.

It seemed to be arguing the far more general point that having an idle immune system could make you susceptible to auto-immune conditions; conditions where where the body is attacked by it's own immune system. I have no idea if that's true or not, proper clinical trials would be needed, but I ain't volunteering!

Any House fans here? It's always Lupas.

>> ^imstellar28:
Prior to FDA regulation, the average time to market of a drug was 18 months and the average cost was $500,000. 10 years later, the average time to market was 8 years and the average cost was $8,000,000. If you would like to see what your life would be like without the FDA, take the cost of your last prescription drug and divide it by 100. Your $30 a month birth control would be $0.30. Your $50 antibiotics would be $0.50. Your grandmothers $1000 heart medicine would be $10.
Yes, the FDA has prevented some dangerous drugs to market, but how many life-saving drugs could have been made available to dying patients if they were released 6.5 year sooner? How many tens of thousands of lives were lost waiting for drugs to be approved? You don't hear about their class action lawsuits because they are all ghosts.


I'm pretty certain most people would say that paying 100x the price for the drug is worth preventing the taking of a human life. If I (or my grandmother) has to pay $990 to relatively ensure that someone else--or even my grandmother herself--doesn't drop dead from taking the drug, we can both live with that cost. By the way, most of my grandmother's drugs are covered by Medicaid/Medicare which also ensures that she never pays that $990 but a minor co-payment instead.

You'd have to be pretty inhuman to bitch about how expensive drugs are and how much better off we'd be if we'd just led people die from the experimental drugs and figure out which ones are safe that way.

As far as drugs that are slow to get to market go, if you really want to try experimental drugs that badly you can go sign up for the clinical trials. But a lot of people wouldn't take the risk even if given the chance to participate. The number of willing risk-takers is probably much lower than "tens of thousands." Except for people with the most dire terminal illnesses, waiting a few years to make sure the drug is safe isn't going to hurt anybody.

And by the way, do you know what the failure rate in drug testing is? According to an article I read about a Japanese company developing new drugs here in the U.S., a new drug has maybe a 1 in 10,000 chance to make it to human trials and a close to 1 in 1,000,000 chance of getting through the human trials without unacceptable side effects being discovered (or the trials showing the drug doesn't actually work as advertised). I'd much rather have the FDA keeping those 999,999 potential dangerous/useless drugs off the market than having to have me or my doctor pick through all those choices whenever I get sick.

>> ^rychan:
Don't post "seem to remember"; post clinical trials, or else it's just FUD.


Here ya go. It even cites sources.

I just watched a show a week or so ago, sorry but I don't remember what the show was, it was either Discover Channel, History Channel or PBS. It had segment on obesity, and they showed a study done with mice. The mice were given equal amounts of food, some were containing sugar, others HFCS. The mice that received food with HFCS were very fat while the mice that received sugar looked like normal mice.

Don't post "seem to remember"; post clinical trials, or else it's just FUD.

This time I wasn't so lazy.

There is still a debate in the scientific community regarding low level exposure to mercury and mercury compounds.

Research indicating low level mercury exposure is toxic:

Chronic low-level mercury exposure, BDNF polymorphism, and associations with cognitive and motor function.

Low Level Mercury Exposure Accelerates Lupus in Mice

Low level methylmercury exposure affects neuropsychological function in adults

Research promoting low level mercury exposure as non-toxic:

Neurobehavioral effects of dental amalgam in children: a randomized clinical trial.

Low-level chronic mercury exposure in children and adolescents: Meta-analysis

My point in linking these few references was to show that there still is a debate within the SCIENTIFIC community about the health effects of low level mercury exposure. This video was produced by scientists, who showed their methods to reach their conclusions. To say this falls outside of science is to say that the Science channel shall show NO scientific debate.

This video wasn't produced by some herbalist or holistic practitioner, but by the University of Calgary's medical faculty. I bet they'd be surprised to find that their video doesn't meet the scientific standards of a video web site.

Question for rembar: If one of the researchers who produced this video called you and asked why this doesn't belong in the Science channel, what would you say? That because the majority of scientists currently think that low level mercury exposure is safe, the debate is over? That no further research into the safety of mercury is necessary? If that's the case, are all the researchers currently investigating low level mercury exposure wasting their time?

The paper is the first result in the google scholar link that I posted. It tested rats with double distilled deionized water (DDW) in the control group and DDW + 2.1 ppm NaF in the test group. 2.1ppm NaF is equal to 1ppm fluoride ion. The rats were not force-fed; the difference was just the type of water in their water bottles. It used a computer program to evaluate rat behavior. It's cited by 60 other papers. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fluoride+varner

In reply to this comment by rembar:
Could you link me or direct me to the paper in which the clinical trial demonstrating the 1 ppm effect on rats is detailed? The video you commented on is teetering towards the edge of getting the boot from the Science channel, and I thought it might be fun to see if it could be rescued before it flails its way into the abyss.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
TV news is so reminiscent of http://www.videosift.com/video/Monty-Python-The-Argument-Clinic-Full-Version

They don't actually go into the details of the placebo-controlled clinical trial that shows 1ppm of fluoride ion in drinking water causes a pattern of behavioral deficits in rats, or the studies of the biochemical mechanisms of its neurotoxicity. Dental Fluorosis is the most benign of the problems excess fluoride can cause. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fluoride+varner

Could you link me or direct me to the paper in which the clinical trial demonstrating the 1 ppm effect on rats is detailed? The video you commented on is teetering towards the edge of getting the boot from the Science channel, and I thought it might be fun to see if it could be rescued before it flails its way into the abyss.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
TV news is so reminiscent of http://www.videosift.com/video/Monty-Python-The-Argument-Clinic-Full-Version

They don't actually go into the details of the placebo-controlled clinical trial that shows 1ppm of fluoride ion in drinking water causes a pattern of behavioral deficits in rats, or the studies of the biochemical mechanisms of its neurotoxicity. Dental Fluorosis is the most benign of the problems excess fluoride can cause. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fluoride+varner

TV news is so reminiscent of http://www.videosift.com/video/Monty-Python-The-Argument-Clinic-Full-Version

They don't actually go into the details of the placebo-controlled clinical trial that shows 1ppm of fluoride ion in drinking water causes a pattern of behavioral deficits in rats, or the studies of the biochemical mechanisms of its neurotoxicity. Dental Fluorosis is the most benign of the problems excess fluoride can cause. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fluoride+varner

The lecturer confuses expectation with probability in his explanation of dilution. If you repeatedly do the 10x dilution process he describes 23 times, the number of molecules of X in the solution is binomially distributed with a mean of 6. If you do it 30 times, the mean is 0.0000006. There's still a slight chance of having a molecule of active ingredient in there.

Homeopathy is a way of parting fools from their money by selling them placebos. All homeopathic and herbal supplement promoters should be required to do double-blind clinical trials to prove all their advertising claims before they're allowed to sell a remedy, just like every other prescription drug. Naturalness doesn't make something safe or effective. Black Widow venom is perfectly natural. The FDA loophole for herbal "supplements" that make drug-like claims is ridiculous and opens the door to all kinds of new snake-oil salesmen.


It's sad that he has to explain powers of ten. That's core 2nd grade curriculum where I come from.

Persephone, have you ever read up on the actual articles cited by the book you're quoting from? Here's what little tidbits I have from scanning the article.

J. Kleijinen, P. Knipschild, and Gerben ter Riet. "Clinical Trials of Homeopathy." British Medical Journal 302 (Feb 9, 1991): 316-323

"CONCLUSIONS--At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias. This indicates that there is a legitimate case for further evaluation of homoeopathy, but only by means of well performed trials."

Note also that the conclusion and analysis portion of the paper recommended publication bias as a serious concern for the legitimacy of a meta-analysis.

J.P. Zmirou, D. D'Adhemar, D. and F. Balducci. "A Controlled Evaluation of a Homeopathic Preparation in the Treatment of Influenza-like Syndromes." British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 299 (1989): 365-366

"Despite the use of terms such as "attributable fraction" which have specific meaning in clinical epidemiology parlance, it would be unwise to claim that the study has demonstrated a cause and effect relationship between the drug and the recoveries.""

What's also good to note is that the "difference in efficacy" for the control and variable group for recovery time was about 7%, while upwards of 12% of patients who were supposed to submit post-sickness data failed to. Also, note that the p-values compared were those typical for a clinical trial, although this had none of the legitimacy of such a trial, due largely to the fact that patients were treated for flu-like symptoms but were not even checked to see if they had the actual disease, as well as the fact that all data measurements were taken by the patients themselves, rather than physicians.

"Quadruple Blind." Lancet (April 4, 1989): 91

What's funny is that, due in no small part to this article, the Lancet has refused to lend editorial support to the article past its publishing and has recently dismissed even the possibility of homeopathy as a legitimate form of treatment.

I will also note that proving the efficacy, or lack thereof, of homeopathy has nothing to do with antibiotics being overused, nor does it have anything to do with calling into question fellow sifters' "life experiences" nor one's own experiences, which are anecdotal and biased in nature and thus not viable as factual evidence in an overall scientific analysis.

I've been using homeopathics to treat our children's health issues since they were babies and I wouldn't be without it. Arnica is fantastic for when they have a fall, eases the pain and they hardly bruise at all. Our nine and six year old have never needed to use antibiotics. We've given them panadol about once each in their lives for pain. Homeopathics has worked the rest of the time for them.

The American govt has never funded homeopathic research, but there has been a significant number of published studies on homeopathy elsewhere.

"The British Medical Journal published a review of twenty-five years of clinical research on homeopathy.(1) The researchers described 107 controlled clinical trials, 81 of which showed successful results from the homeopathic medicines. Of these 107 studies, a significant percentage of the highest-quality experiments showed positive results from homeopathic medicines".

"A study of 487 patients with influenza showed that a homeopathic medicine, Anas barbariae 200C, was effective; almost twice as many patients given this remedy had their flu symptoms completely resolved within 48 hours, as compared with the patients given a placebo. This study was published in the British Journal of Pharmacology(2) and received special commendation from the Lancet(3)".

(1) J. Kleijinen, P. Knipschild, and Gerben ter Riet. "Clinical Trials of Homeopathy." British Medical Journal 302 (Feb 9, 1991): 316-323

(2) J.P. Zmirou, D. D'Adhemar, D. and F. Balducci. "A Controlled Evaluation of a Homeopathic Preparation in the Treatment of Influenza-like Syndromes." British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology 299 (1989): 365-366

(3) "Quadruple Blind." Lancet (April 4, 1989): 91

Taken from: "Homeopathic Medicine for Children and Infants"
Dana Ullmann, Putnam, N.Y. 1992