“Side Effect”: One More Bogus Big Pharma Marketing Ploy

     In her interview last week on the Mad in America website, Professor Diana Rose of the Australian National University revealed the actual reason for the effect/side effect distinction in clinical trials. She should know. Besides her prestigious user-led academic research credentials, she has worked on many other research programs at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.

     The popular idea that some of the effects of a particular drug on a person are merely “side effects” — and therefore easily dismissed as unimportant when you are making a decision to take a drug or not — is simply more Big Pharma marketing madness. They have taken a necessary design aspect of any randomized control trial and distorted it into a more palatable justification to take one of their profitable, but dangerous antidepressants.

     If an effect from a drug is something that only occurs off to the side, their marketing implies, why worry about it, right?

     The fact is there is only such a thing as a “side effect” because a clinical trial must define the exact variable they wish to study. Any other variable then becomes less important to their research outcome. It becomes a side effect. For instance, if a research trial looks at the levels of serotonin that a drug produces in the brain, that is the focus of the study…exclusively. The fact that a person also feels deathly ill because of the amount of extra serotonin in their stomach is a statistically unimportant side effect…but only for the researchers, not for those with the stomach problem.

     That is the way any clinical trial must be designed and its results monitored in order to have statistically reliable results about the specific effect being researched. That is how any valid Randomized Control Trial must work. Fair enough, scientifically.

     Consequently, all those other effects of the drug on a human being are appropriately minimized in the researchers’ vocabulary to “side effects.” Big Pharma then only need rattle them off at lightning speed in the last half of their antidepressant commercials. The FDA follows suit in their Black Box warnings.

     So the fact that research has also found that taking an antidepressant doubles your chances of committing suicide becomes an incidental “side effect.”

     What if an ad for Paxil started off with “Doubles your chances of committing suicide” and only in the last half of the commercial notes very quickly that you might also temporarily feel less upset about the recent death of your Uncle Fred?

     The idea that there is an effect and a separate side effect is a distortion of truth. Big Pharma uses that distortion (aka, “lie”) to keep increasing its 6.3 billion dollar annual revenue from the antidepressants that 43,000,000 million Americans are now taking because they’ve been brainwashed to ignore their “side effects.”