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Can't wait for more whitewashing from @SickKidsNews . Most of our Canadian media couldn't be bothered to look into Motherisk's recommendations, made by doctors taking money from pharmaceutical companies and scaremongering about stopping useless drugs during pregnancy. https://twitter.com/TorontoStar/status/1074681905461760001
BTW, Gideon Koren is still publishing papers. Here he is scaring women into continuing to take antidepressants during pregnancy, despite the fact they are associated with decreased birth weight, miscarriages etc and show no reduction in all cause mortality in moms who take them.
https://www.jogc.com/article/S1701-2163(15)30364-9/pdf
"Clinicians who provide care for pregnant women with
depression have to weigh the rare adverse maternal and fetal effects of AD medications against the effects of not treating women who need these drugs for a
potentially life-threatening condition."
"Clinicians who provide care for pregnant women with
depression have to weigh the rare adverse maternal and fetal effects of AD medications against the effects of not treating women who need these drugs for a
potentially life-threatening condition."
This is a complete misrepresentation of the evidence, exactly the service motherisk provided before the Koren scandal, but it seems like no doctors or media could be bothered to take notice of recommendations from pharmaceutical company sponsored "researchers". @CBCAlerts
Instead, doctors and media treated the loss of this program as some sort of national tragedy: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/04/17/motherisk-shuts-down-help-line_a_23713368/?guccounter=1
"Well the guy who ran this program was a corrupt fraud, real shame to lose it! No further investigation needed!"
"Well the guy who ran this program was a corrupt fraud, real shame to lose it! No further investigation needed!"
Yes, depression is a life threatening condition, but antidepressants do not offer any reduction in suicide or mortality risk over placebo, so recommending that pregnant women take them over psychotherapy is completely nuts: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30246595/
As for the effectiveness of antidepressants, they offer extremely minor benefits for the average patient, a bit less than 2 points on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (a 52 pt scale) according to the best research from scientists at Cochrane. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/6/e024886
Lifesaving they are not, teratogenic they are: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/7/1/e013372
"Conclusions Antidepressants with effects on serotonin reuptake during embryogenesis increased the risk of some organ-specific malformations in a cohort of pregnant women with depression."
"Conclusions Antidepressants with effects on serotonin reuptake during embryogenesis increased the risk of some organ-specific malformations in a cohort of pregnant women with depression."
