Posted by zeugma on February 13, 2006, at 16:12:46
In reply to Re: but correlation is not causation, posted by linkadge on February 13, 2006, at 10:17:59
Perhaps people taking that medicine back then had a hunch too, that it may be doing strange things. I wouldn't ingore a hunch just because it is not scientific.>>
nor would i. healy tells the story of how patients on Parnate in the early '60's would complain of splitting headaches after eating cheese. the doctors they complained to would laugh and tell them that their imaginations were running away with them. but of course the patients were right and the doctors had to learn about tyramine the hard way (not as hard as their patients of course :-( )
it's like that with many things, the cytochrome P450 sytem was discovered in the 50's I believe, but its clinical implications did not become clear until patients on Prozac and amitriptyline would occasionally die despite 'therapeutic' dosages of amitriptyline. No one wants to find out about these things the hard way so caution is advised, even in the face of a doctors' smirk (and i can imagine a doctor smirking about patients' blaming cheese for their headaches, before the nature of the reaction was described in the Lancet)
-z
poster:zeugma
thread:608339
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060212/msgs/609233.html