Daniel Carpenter: belief

Transcript context

…How should we improve our system of drug labels? Does anyone read them? Do they give real information? Can we make that better? One of the findings out there is that black-box labeling definitely changes behavior, sometimes for the worse. There’s an argument out there that when you added suicidality to SSRIs, that one of the results was that psychiatrists and primary care physicians were prescribing them less commonly to teenagers, adolescents, and others, and that we had increased suicides as a result. So, we need to think very carefully. To just call it a cost-benefit analysis, I think, is both right and wrong. There needs to be a perspective consideration of what [are] the health costs of putting something on a black box label. That would do it. The other thing I would say is, the usual argument is that doctors only, what, 50 percent to 60 percent of the time read the label. There are some people who say, “Well, then the label beyond the black box really isn’t effective.” I actually agree. It’s not that I’m generally a glass-half-full guy. I just happen to think that 50 percent to 60 percent of people reading the actual label is actually something that we should be pleasantly surprised about. Should we allow for placebo prescriptions for depression, for back pain? It seems they might work. We do already in a sense, right?…

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