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Sounds like you don't know what you are talking about. Your source is a book written with heavy influence by the Pharmaceutical industry to justify the obscene costs of their drugs, making billions in profits off of sick, poor people. You are the one who is completely wrong. The dosages most certainly do start out with a "best guess" in the pre-clinical phase. For any given drug we would guess at the doses based on our calculations, and give a range on either end. If we thought the effective dose would be 1 mg/kg, we would run an LD50 of doses much higher than that, 10mg/kg, 100mg/kg. Sometimes our guesses would be wrong, and the low dose animals would die as a result. After figuring out a safe dose, we would then split it further into different dosing groups to test the effectiveness of the compound. Most people in the field are underpaid, overworked, and do sloppy work Please talk to someone who has actually worked in the Pharma research field, they will tell you most of what they do is just guessing.. why do you think only 1 in 10,000 make it through? It's all a guess until the end, and even then we're often not sure. Look at anti-depressants. We still don't know how a lot of those work but prescribe them to millions of people regardless. How do you think they determined the dose when they don't know how the drug works? |
Hence the 'The dose we take is not a "BEST GUESS"' (emphasis mine). Unless you're a lab animal or a person in a clinical trial, the does you take is the end result of lots of money spent on first figuring out maximum safe dosages (Phase 1) to prescribing guidelines that doctors are taught (Phase 3).
Antidepressants are a unique group of drugs because the dosage is highly dependent on each person's unique brain chemistry and a huge part of a good psychiatrist's job is working with their patients to find the right dosage and combination. The problem is that many psychiatrists don't have the time (due to insurance billing practices) or the patience to do the work but any decent psychiatrist will tell you that recommended doses for antidepressants are just a safe starting point for most patients, not the dosage that they will eventually find most effective.
For the record, I have worked in the pharmaceutical industry on pre-clinical drug development and Phase 1-3 marketing applications and the GP's description is largely accurate whereas you seem to have a chip on your shoulder. I wouldn't trust a single book about the drug development process that wasn't heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry in one way or another just like I wouldn't trust anyone without semiconductor industry experience when talking about Intel's cutting edge fabrication processes.