Posted by Camille Dumont on August 19, 2004, at 23:56:03
In reply to Re: My doctor told me that Lex is harmless » krisdance83, posted by chemist on August 19, 2004, at 23:20:26
On a semi-related line of thought .... medication s.e. stories on the internet are like bad weather ... if you listen to the weather channel every morning ... what do you remember? Well you tend to remember the 1% of the time when they are horribly wrong ... not the 99% of the time they are right and this will stick into your mind.
Similarly, if you take a medication and everything is fine, no s.e. and what not, are you going to build a website to talk about your experience? Most likely not ... since pretty much nothing happened. On the other hand, if you take meds and things go horribly wrong ... then you,re probably more likely to want to share your experience with others. Thus, stories on the internet have a selection bias inherent to them and you have to take that into account when looking for info on the web ... the proportion of people who experienced strong s.e. is thus overrepresented.
Perhaps the official stats for the drugs where you see what percentage of those on teh drugs vs. the percentage of the placebo experienced the various s.e. it will help you get a better picture or what you can expect.
poster:Camille Dumont
thread:379713
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040817/msgs/379737.html