’…William Potter, most recently Vice President of Translational Neuroscience at Merck Research Labs, Merck & Co., Inc., explained that a truly novel antidepressant has not been introduced in the last 40 years. According to Potter, the period of SSRI development established a level of comfort in the mental health community that may have temporarily hindered the development of new and better antidepressants. Today, significant effort is focused on understanding the challenges to developing novel antidepressant therapies and designing the informative clinical trials necessary to test the effectiveness of new discoveries…’
As for my personal story of antidepressants—they were okay, but mdma was better. Things don’t have to be ‘anti-depressants’ to act to counter depression IMO. Reading over that MDMA LW chat log in retrospect is weird. I really wasn’t taking in just about anyone elses agenda. It was all about me in my mind at the end. Empathy my ass! Though, thinking back to my MDMA experience (and the ‘dada’ song I listened to) gives me a happy default to return to when I’m upset, instead of say anger, detachment and sadness which I sometimes resort to.
My dentist consistently knows whether I’ve been brushing much or not, and when he does a cleaning it hurts a lot more if I haven’t been doing it much. Also, after four or five days of not brushing my gums start to hurt, and they feel a lot better after brushing. That of course is consistent with e.g. the fact that you start to itch if you don’t wash other parts of your body and so on. So that seems like good evidence that brushing is at least as useful as washing in general, even if it is only anecdotal insofar as that is my personal experience.
Dentists ability to predict whether you brush or not isn’t evidence that brushing is better than not brushing at reducing undesirable outcomes, unless the undesirable outcome for you is your dentists chastising, rather than a negative health state
As for my personal story of antidepressants—they were okay, but mdma was better. Things don’t have to be ‘anti-depressants’ to act to counter depression IMO. Reading over that MDMA LW chat log in retrospect is weird. I really wasn’t taking in just about anyone elses agenda. It was all about me in my mind at the end. Empathy my ass! Though, thinking back to my MDMA experience (and the ‘dada’ song I listened to) gives me a happy default to return to when I’m upset, instead of say anger, detachment and sadness which I sometimes resort to.
My dentist consistently knows whether I’ve been brushing much or not, and when he does a cleaning it hurts a lot more if I haven’t been doing it much. Also, after four or five days of not brushing my gums start to hurt, and they feel a lot better after brushing. That of course is consistent with e.g. the fact that you start to itch if you don’t wash other parts of your body and so on. So that seems like good evidence that brushing is at least as useful as washing in general, even if it is only anecdotal insofar as that is my personal experience.
Dentists ability to predict whether you brush or not isn’t evidence that brushing is better than not brushing at reducing undesirable outcomes, unless the undesirable outcome for you is your dentists chastising, rather than a negative health state