Foreign Correspondents

The conventional wisdom is that antidepressant medications are effective and safe. However, the scientific literature shows that the conventional wisdom is flawed. While all prescription medications have side effects, antidepressant medications appear to do more harm than good as treatments for depression.

I quit taking Prozac using a step-down method. Started in Sept. 2011 and finally off in January 2012. I experienced severe loss of balance early on, which progressed into full-blown ataxia & parasthesia. Have had extensive blood-testing & MRIs of brain & cervical spine, all negative! I have to believe this is a result of coming off Prozac, although most sites say the withdrawal side effects don't last this long.

In Medicine there’s a saying “if you hear hoofbeats, don’t look for zebras.” It’s a reference to the wisdom of looking for the most likely explanations when making a diagnosis rather than looking for those that are rare and unusual. Hoofbeats are of course more likely to be the common horse than the rare zebra. My encounters with New Zealand’s pharmacovigilance system over the past four years have been akin to a safari, where I have witnessed scientists involved in pharmacovigilance and medicines regulators wildly hunting zebras while a rather large and obvious horse was standing on their toes.

Three weeks ago What would Batman do Now covered the issue of suicide in the military – an issue that had Batman missing in action, and...

The marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies focus in on the ring-bearers just as the Eye of Sauron focused in on Gollum and later Frodo. Once the Eye fixes on a ring-bearer, it hypnotizes him into submission. If any demur, it directs its Black Riders (Medical Academics) to enforce compliance with its Will.

My son is dead. He hanged himself at 17 but meh… whatever… that’s yesterday’s news and I’m totally over it now. I don’t long for...

On Thursday, May 31, 2001, a woman whose name is known only to GlaxoSmithKline emailed the company:   "My name is... I was diagnosed with panic...

I had an epiphany the day I first saw my son in a coffin after his suicide. The moments following his hanging himself were...

Odysseus was in his 70s. Coming up to the 50th anniversary of a very happy marriage. He had formerly been a respected professional, a...

Today is the fourth anniversary of the suicide of my only child. Supporting someone dealing with the grief of losing a child to suicide can be challenging. For all those who have been hurt by well-intentioned comments or interventions, I want to offer the following suggestions to friends, family and helping professionals.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) came into favor in the wake of thalidomide as a method to evaluate drugs and their risks. They were supposed to...

This is an article written by a woman named Anne-Marie. I am publishing it here because it epitomizes what RxISK.org, a company I have founded, is all about. It tells of one woman extraordinarily getting to grips with a problem she has on treatment. My hope is that when RxISK.org is up and running we will be able to make it easier for people like Anne-Marie to engage with their doctors to solve problems like this.

This series of blogs outlines a scandal that brings out the limitations of RCTs and evidence based medicine. Here are the first four installments, with two more to come shortly.