Monday 26 January 2009

How do you reconcile this?

Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Reconcile, state that "separation anxiety is a clinical condition in your dog's brain". Drug companies are usually more circumspect about making this claim in humans. They generally admit that the theory that mental disorders are caused by chemical imbalance is merely a hypothesis. They suggest that disorders like depression may be caused by an imbalance of chemical messengers in the brain and there may be a problem in depression with the balance of the serotonin system that affects the cell to cell communication (my emphasis). Of course, many people, both doctors and patients, go further by acting as though this hypothesis is true. Why are Eli Lilly so much more certain about this hypothesis with animals? Perhaps it doesn't matter if they are wrong. All the more reason for this campaign.

As with Clomicalm, the evidence is that Reconcile is only effective with behaviour modification. So it may not work on its own. And yet the FDA has licensed it. Doesn't the FDA understand about amplified placebo effects? Next step please to call the FDA to account.

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