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by kawhah 976 days ago
Ok, so the middle-brow infotainment psych blogger's essay is valid, but meta-analyses are 'fundamentally flawed' because 'different SSRIs affect people differently'?

This news will probably come as a huge surprise to the psychiatric epidemiologists who carried out the peer-reviewed research that Alexander mangles! They probably thought all SSRIs were exactly the same!
2 comments
2devnull 976 days ago
“psychiatric epidemiologist“

I was with you up to this. What even is a “psychiatric epidemiologist” I had to look it up,

“It is a subfield of the more general epidemiology. It has roots in sociological studies of the early 20th century. However, while sociological exposures are still widely studied in psychiatric epidemiology, the field has since expanded to the study of a wide area of environmental risk factors, such as major life events,“

Yeah, I don’t know, I’d sort of go with an experienced clinician when it comes to advice about pills. Sociology/epidemiology is cool, but there’s a lot to say for the importance of “practice” in medicine.

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kawhah 976 days ago
Good rebuttal. The person who did the peer-reviewed statistical research is wrong because Wikipedia describes their discipline as related to sociology.
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2devnull 976 days ago
No, I’m just saying that for me personally, if I wanted advice about taking psychiatric medication, I would prefer a clinicians view over the view of a epidemiological researcher, _even if they have the exact same level of training as medical doctors_. I don’t know about the researchers in question, maybe they too are practitioners. If they are, you should qualify that they aren’t merely epidemiologists. Epidemiology as a field has a problem with replication not unlike psychology or nutrition research.
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zdragnar 976 days ago
A meta-analysis of SSRIs isn't very useful, since it draws conclusions about a group of drugs that do not have similar behaviors within an individual.

It's a bit like doing a meta analysis of hydrocarbons in two and four stroke engines. Some will work better than others in some situations, but the meta analysis itself isn't illuminating when you are putting liquid propane into a gunked up carburetor.

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