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OrphanWilde comments on Systemic review of antidepressants vs placebo commentary - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: michael_b 03 June 2015 12:40PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 03 June 2015 01:24:33PM 0 points [-]

The absence of the percentage of people on placebos who guessed that they had been given the real antidepressants suggests cherry-picking. Cherry-picking suggests the entire article is garbage.

Unfortunately the article they cite is behind a paywall, but the abstract includes this: "We studied medication guesses of 137 depressed patients and/or their doctors at the end of a 6-week randomized trial of placebo, imipramine, and phenelzine. Overall, 78% of the patients and 87% of the doctors correctly distinguished between placebo and active medication"

Assuming 1/3 were assigned to each group, and the majority of each group guessed they were on medications, the patient percentages are pretty close to what you'd expect anyways.

Comment author: ChristianKl 03 June 2015 01:44:59PM 2 points [-]

From the paper:

Percent correct was 87% (34/39) for imipramine, 96% (22/ 24) for phenelzine, and 59% (22/ 37) for placebo.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 03 June 2015 02:27:54PM 0 points [-]

That's more useful information.

That's significant at a 99% interval with a two-tailed test, so that's significant as far as I'm concerned. (I kept misreading that, and my first three or four calculations with that were assuming 22/37 placebo tests were guessing "Antidepressant" instead of "placebo", so it took an inordinate amount of time to get there. Did the same thing reading the abstract, actually. Teach me to read more carefully.)