Pfizer, Zoloft And The Vexing Placebo Effect

In an unusual gambit, a California woman has filed a lawsuit claiming that the Zoloft antidepressant sold by Pfizer is no more effective than a placebo and that the drugmaker conspired to hide this fact from the medical community and the public in hopes of generating as many sales as possible. For its part, Pfizer contends that studies have shown that Zoloft is effective and maintains the lawsuit is frivolous. The lawsuit was filed by Laura Plumlee, who maintains that Zoloft failed to help her during three years of treatment. She argues that most clinical trials that were designed to substantiate effectiveness demonstrated that Zoloft was not superior to placebo and that the difference between Zoloft and placebo in “the only two studies” that did show the pill was more effective than a placebo had been obtained through “data manipulation” (here is the lawsuit). The complaint relies, in part, on research by Irving Kirsch, a director of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School, who caused a ruckus last year when ’60 Minutes’ featured his work in a segment about antidepressants and the placebo effect. He filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain unpublished trial data and contended that, when combining results with published data, various drugs were no better than dummy pills. “The only place where you get a clinically meaningful difference is at these very extreme levels of depression,” Kirsch, who is serving as...
Source: Pharmalot - Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: Tags: Uncategorized 60 Minutes Antidepressants GlaxoSmithKline Paxil Pfizer Placebo Effect Zoloft Source Type: blogs