Antidepressants Blog

Practitioners have a great plenty of patients whose chief, if not only, troubles are emotional. Many medical men will tell you that such make up a large part of their patients. These are the ones who benefit much by our famous medicine, the placebo. One definition of this is an inactive medicine given merely to benefit a patient. Another is a medicine given more to please than to benefit a patient, but a philosopher has remarked that anything that pleases does some good.

Of course many a drug is a placebo for the physician as much as for the patient. For years practically every sick eye in the so-called civilized world has been treated by a boric acid eyewash. A small amount of boric acid, not taken internally, is an inert thing; but washing out the eye was good and everybody agreed that it was the proper thing to use. I have operated quite a bit in the mouth and I have a favorite mouth wash. A dry crusted mouth is pretty miserable and this wash kept the patient more comfortable than morphine. It killed the smell a good deal and perhaps took a bit of stinging away. However, rinsing the mouth with a weak salt solution would have done very well, but the patient would not have thought that much treatment. How much of my treatment was placebo? Digitalis is valuable in certain kinds of heart disease. There is no doubt of its efficiency and few drugs have ever been used more. But forty years or so ago a young physician, who has since made a great mark, went about purchasing samples of digitalis in the drugstores of the city where his medical school was. He found that a large proportion had been kept too long and was inert when tested on frogs, which have no emotions connected with their heart action. Yet the teamwork of emotions between the physicians, who knew of the physiological effects of digitalis, and their confiding patients slowed up many a heart.

Sir William Osier said, “Faith in the gods or the saints cures one, faith in little pills another, hypnotic suggestion a third, faith in a plain common doctor a fourth.” Your doctor often has to make some tries in attempting to get you well. He undoubtedly uses placebos some in doing this. Man enjoys taking medicine and it is to be presumed that is because he has so developed the emotion of hope.

In Greek mythology Pandora was the first woman. She antedated our Eve, and as men wrote the mythology, she also was the cause of all our troubles. In her husband’s house was a jar, containing plagues: gout, rheumatism, and colic for the body; spite, envy, and fear for the mind. Curiosity made her lift the lid and out flew these and all the other plagues, but she closed it quickly enough to hold hope, an antidote which had been left with the poisons. It may well be that these simple medicines, tinctured with hope, have done more good than even our modern wonder drugs.

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GENERAL HEALTH

Mental illness often starts early in life and ends late, leaving shattered families in its wake. It is more frightening, more mysterious, and more costly than almost any other disease.

Or it used to be.

That dark picture is brightening very rapidly now, thanks largely to the development of at least 50 new drugs that help check, if not cure, the worst of the major mental illnesses. They are schizophrenia, bipolar mood disorder (manic-depressive psychosis), major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, and panic disorder.

Back in 1960, when the population of America’s mental institutions totaled 630,000, most people with these afflictions were doomed to pass their lives in grim incarceration. Now, properly treated and medicated, up to 80 percent of patients with the worst cases of those six mental illnesses can and do live normal or nearly normal lives.

Dr. David Pickar heads the experimental therapeutics branch of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Speaking for his fellow researchers, Dr. Pickar says, “There is a generation of us who have spent 20 years or more of our lives hoping, looking and tracking a big jump. The next giant step is in the immediate future.”

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GENERAL HEALTH