Trusting Your Doctor: A Fatal Mistake.

landon has always had his issues
mentally he's someone that is not as open about it i share everything with you guys and i've always been very open about my struggles with depression and anxiety and that's just me i get a lot of comfort in talking to you guys about those kinds of things landon is a very quiet secretive person and he has had mental health issues for as long as i have known him he suffered from anxiety and depression he has adhd which he has had since he was a little boy so his whole life he's always just kind of struggled with his emotions and just the way his brain was wired around the time that i got pregnant with delilah he kind of started falling into a depression i don't think the two are correlated whatsoever we tried for delilah she wasn't an accident and we both came to the mutual decision that we wanted another baby at that time but there was other things going on with our lives that we didn't really talk about many factors just kind of contributed to the fact that his mental health just wasn't really great at the time so he went to see a psychiatrist it's not his first time visiting a psychiatrist when he was younger all throughout elementary school and middle school he took adhd medication he stopped taking it in high school he just didn't really like the way it felt but he was starting school online so he wanted to get back on that and then he also decided that it would be a good idea to start on antidepressants and maybe something to help with his anxiety so he went to the psychiatrist and kind of explained his issues he was having you know i'm having panic attacks i'm depressed and i have trouble focusing so his doctor prescribed him adhd medication antidepressants and an anti-anxiety medication he did the right thing you know when you're going through something everyone tells you like find help go seek help his intentions were so pure he just wanted help he just wanted to get better and he just got worse the anti-anxiety medication that was prescribed to him was for when he was having a panic attack it wasn't something he took daily he was only supposed to take it when there was no other way for him to calm down in the middle of panic attack but they were highly addictive and then at the same time the adhd medication was kind of addictive because you take it and you have all this energy to do all the things you need to do in your day so he'd take it and he'd clean the house and he'd be kind of manic and when he was distracted with all these little things that he was now able to focus on it kind of took away from his anxious and depressing thoughts so he got into this pattern of waking up in the morning and taking his adhd medication to wake him up and he felt awake and ready for the day and he got a ton of stuff done during the day and felt really good and happy and productive but another thing about adhd medication is it can kind of have some side effects when it starts to wear off and you know you kind of come down from that high and you're just kind of depressed and sad and kind of the opposite you have no motivation and it just kind of really hits you hard when your medicine wears off but then he had his anti-anxiety medication so i was like okay well i'm not feeling great let me take this medicine to kind of calm myself down and it makes you sleepy and drowsy so he'd take that to relax and be able to get to sleep because another thing that the adhd medication affected was being able to sleep it makes you awake and it stays in your system for a while so when you do finally lay down to get to bed you're physically exhausted your body is really tired from everything you did that day but your brain is still going really fast so it was kind of a lethal mixture of these two very strong heavy drugs both very addicting and he just kind of fell into a hole he needed the uppers to get up in the morning and the downers to slow down at night and the more downers he took at night the more uppers he needed to wake himself up and the more uppers he took during the day the more downers he needed to go to bed i thought you know the doctor gave that to him like it can't hurt why would a doctor prescribe that if it was bad for him and he's dead that story ends with the young man's death link in the description to the full video if you haven't seen already as many many millions of views what's the moral to the story do you want to draw a conclusion about the effects of the drugs themselves do you want to draw a conclusion about the young woman's statement there at the end as i've edited that five minute excerpt from the video she wanted to draw a conclusion about the trust she put in doctors her unquestioning deference to authority i want to draw a question about the way we live with knowledge and uncertainty in the 21st century a friend of a friend recently was prescribed antidepressants and i was asked to do a little bit of research on the particular antidepressants involved and then i ended up in a conversation with a friend of a friend of a friend someone is really not my friend at all who was insisting that this drug that a doctor had recommended on the basis of just a few minutes in an interview very brief face-to-face conversation that this drug was precisely the cure for all of the problems that this friend of a friend was having so the way the reasoning works is this um she's having trouble sleeping so therefore this drug will help her sleep she's lost a lot of weight so therefore this drug will help her gain weight because it's what the doctor ordered this wasn't a discussion about side effects this wasn't a discussion about the percentile rate of effectiveness of the placebo effect you know natural rate of recovery versus no the problem was that everything he was imagining the drug would do was not even claimed in the documentation for the drug produced by the drug manufacturer themselves right so i was in a position of saying you're imagining and ascribing to this drug what you want it to do you're engaged in wishful thinking right but this isn't in any way based on the promise of what this actual drug is even supposed to not even the manufacturer claims that this drug will do what you want to do we have a whole kind of pseudoscience of labeling drugs as antidepressants labeling drugs as antipsychotics etc that is not based on the chemical effects of those drugs and you know to some extent as with criticizing religion like the critique of the religious leaders only goes so far and at some point you have to turn and look at the followers and say well aren't you people responsible for your own decisions in life when i was reading the information provided by the manufacturer so this is not a critique this is the manufacturer's own information you know it it admitted things in passing about this particular antidepressant it admitted that there were three different studies that found that the drug had no benefit at all when compared to placebo now of course they were more interested in telling you about the other studies that did find some benefit no matter how minor you know that was measured and there is this big overarching problem with publication bias that in general studies that find an effect other than what the manufacturer is looking for will not be published will not be promoted or may even be in sealed data in uh findings that are presented to the food and drug administration but are kept secret from the general pope this is a problem in the american system of how drugs are tested how drugs are evaluated and partly um the american public says fair enough because the actual research is being paid for by the drug companies who want to market the drug so they do ten different tests and nine of them show no positive effect from the drug but one does they have the right to just you know publish and promote that research but i mean there was an especially telling little paragraph in this advisory from the manufacturer it seemed to me from the way it was written that some pages were intended for the patient and some for the doctor don't know exactly what the deal is with how these things are circulated i i just got as a pdf directly off the internet so perhaps these were instructions for doctors to talk these things through there was this one very telling paragraph where it said well you know there are a lot of confounding factors with this kind of research uh to establish whether or not you know what drug is effective so you know can you really expect the effect of the drug to stand out to be measurable to show up empirically um compared to all these confounding factors i'm sitting there reading this and i can't help thinking you know if you have a headache the effect of aspirin is very very subtle on two different days on one day if you have a headache you take aspirin and you lie down and then you feel better 30 minutes later you may attribute that effect to the aspirin and on another day you have very similar headache and you decide to just lie down and wait 30 minutes without taking the aspirin you may also find that you feel better right so in your own life if you just reflect on the effects of something like aspirin and how difficult it might be to really empirically etiologically pin down exactly how effective is aspirations interesting challenge but these drugs we're talking about multi-billion dollar marketing success story they are in the position of saying that they they can't even prove how efficacious they are their positive effects remain more dubious more difficult to prove than the very subtle medical benefit of something like aspirin in treating headaches so wishful thinking it's dangerous it's more dangerous than people could possibly imagine you can tell yourself a very simple story a very reassuring lie like oh if the doctor recommended this for me it can't possibly harm me you can tell yourself a lie that oh well this is my problem and this is what the doctor recommended therefore the effects of this drug must be the opposite of my problem they must counteract my symptoms they must have an effect that's very much you know corresponding to what i explained to the doctor my problem was no if you go when you read the label if you read the warning for the manufacturer in this case the expectation was that the drug would provide a calming effect resulting in more sleep and the label is warning you that side effects include mania right now the critique of the drug particular antidepressants case not on the label is that the reason why it causes mania in some patients is that part of its effect is of a a stimulant effect not so different from uh methamphetamines and that then the withdrawal when you quit the drug also has these very negative effects in some ways comparable to methamphetamine antidepressants are very different from methamphetamines but this is you know an attempt of a medical doctor to talk through what the what the disadvantages of of taking the drug are um you know there's an alternative there's an alternative to believing what people tell you and there's an alternative to in this way engaging in wishful thinking and making up stories yourself you know it seems to be the hardest thing for people to really admit to themselves i don't know you know and if you're sitting there you know looking at that drug in a bottle if you've been handed a prescription by a doctor and you know again that may be on the basis of doctor having a five-minute conversation or a two-minute conversation i have a story i guess i won't say who this is but whatever i have a story from a friend um who threw a tantrum in a doctor's office because some test results for a physically real condition came back and didn't show anything more or the other and the doctor without discussing it at all just you know some friend of mine freaked out like oh well you know i didn't get the the testosterone don't tell me anything with it and the doctor uh without any discussion just took out a prescription pad and wrote you know prozac wrote a depressive prescription no no discussion of what your problem is what the solution is what's that what your problem no like like oh yeah here's your consolation prize sorry your symptoms these things are prescribed they are handed out with no you know with no firm basis without without diagnostic criteria um but whatever the story however it is you've arrived at this you know situation where you're sitting there with this prescription your hand or with the drug in your hand it seems to me that you have to start with the humbling realization i don't know and the wonderful thing in the 21st century is you don't even need to go to a library to find out there's a lot of research there are a lot of hard facts that are presented even by the manufacturers of these drugs themselves even by the food and drug administration you know by the american government probably whatever country you're in uh but the government you really can know you know and then whatever decision you make you know you just count the number of hours like maybe maybe it's going to be six hours you put into researching this drug before you feel you know you got to recognize your medical doctor didn't have six hours your medical doctor didn't have six hours to look into this and think about how many drugs he deals with in his profession and how many different patients it's not an excuse but the fact of the matter is the doctor can't look into every drug in his life for six hours but you can look into every drug in your life for six hours for 12 hours for whatever it takes you can take responsibility you know for your own health uh to that extent and as i say all of that begins with having the humility to admit to yourself that you just don't know and maybe feeling scared maybe feeling afraid and then respond to that fear in a really constructive way as with the young man his story was told at the beginning of this video in this case the difference between ignorance and having a well-informed opinion could be the difference between death and life