Posted by mtdewcmu on November 27, 2009, at 12:06:37
In reply to Re: I'm an exercise skeptic, posted by SLS on November 27, 2009, at 4:07:34
> I think one needs to respect the potential for depression to render one nearly motionless with paralyzing psychomotor retardation and suffocating anergia. To intimate that a person with such a presentation can exercise if they were only to try hard enough can insinuate that they perhaps are somehow inferior and simply do not want to do what might be necessary to get well. Of course performing exercise is generally a good thing. But that doesn't mean that everyone is capable of it. Fortunately, there are other ways of treating depression. Exercise is not a necessary component of most treatment regimes. Actually, there are a few doctors who believe that intense anaerobic resistance exercise like weight-lifting can make someone feel worse instead of better - something about depleting brain amines. I don't know if I agree with this, though.
>I agree. Therefore, only less-depressed people will tend to exercise, which constitutes one form of bias. The other bias is, of course, the placebo effect.
For all the attention exercise gets vis-a-vis depression, you would expect there to be more controlled experiments to determine what are the exact benefits of exercise. It would be challenging, but not necessarily impossible, to find an adequate placebo for the control group in order to maintain blinding.
poster:mtdewcmu
thread:926857
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20091127/msgs/927151.html