Tag: research

Reading of the Week: David Goldbloom on Research & Clinical Practice

 From a Contributing Editor, Colleague, and Friend of the Editor

This week’s selection is a brief paper with long implications. For all of us clinicians who turn to the peer-reviewed literature (either directly or through the filter of Reading of The Week) for guidance on how to help our patients, this paper is worth a read.

It is impossible to stay current on the treatment research results that emerge daily, and we look to those randomized controlled trials published in high-impact peer-reviewed journals for evidence of what works for people with the diagnoses that we find ourselves addressing in the office, the clinic, the ER or the inpatient unit. But who are those patients who sign consent forms to take part in these studies, and how much do they resemble the people sitting across from us?

Great clipboard but relevant to clinical work? 

– David Goldbloom, OC, MD, FRCP(C)
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Reading of the Week: Do the Meds Work? Peter Kramer’s Essay, and More

From the Editor

Do the pills really work?

It’s a question that we clinicians are repeatedly asked. Antidepressants are widely prescribed, but often doubted – by our patients and by people in general.

This week, we look at an essay penned by Dr. Peter Kramer, an American psychiatrist. Dr. Kramer, you may recall, made a name for himself two decades ago by extolling the super-therapeutic powers of Prozac. Today, he has a more modest goal: explaining the role of antidepressants in the treatment of depression.

Then, looking to The New England Journal of Medicine, we consider a paper that discusses the rise and, perhaps, fall of randomized controlled trials as the “gold standard” of medical research.

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Reading of the Week: Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis

American psychiatry is facing a quandary: Despite a vast investment in basic neuroscience research and its rich intellectual promise, we have little to show for it on the treatment front.

With few exceptions, every major class of current psychotropic drugs — antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety medications — basically targets the same receptors and neurotransmitters in the brain as did their precursors, which were developed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Sure, the newer drugs are generally safer and more tolerable than the older ones, but they are no more effective.

So begins this week’s Reading, which considers the state of psychiatry, and psychiatric research funding.

Here’s a quick summary: the author suggests that the neuroscience revolution is something of a bust and that psychotherapies are worthy of more study and use. This may seem like a strong argument. And it is – particularly given the bias of the author, who is, by his own description: “a psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist who loves neuroscience.”

This week’s Reading: “Psychiatry’s Identity Crisis” by Weill Cornell Medical College’s Richard A. Friedman was recently published by The New York Times.

The article can be found here:

www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/opinion/psychiatrys-identity-crisis.html

Dr. Richard A. Friedman

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