Posted by Iansf on August 16, 2004, at 17:20:31
In reply to Re: How do you know the volunteer is healthy?, posted by JLM on August 16, 2004, at 8:07:05
> I'm a bit confused. How do the Lilly investigators know that they have a 'healhy volunteer' WITHOUT doing a psychiatric evaluation? I'm willing to accept the possibility that they didn't do one, but if that's the case, that's rather disturbing IMO.
>I've suffered from depression since I was a teenager, but I think I would have little problem convincing even a very skilled psychiatrist that I had never been seriously depressed in my life. I know how to answer the questions in ways that point to general contentedness. Perhaps I wouldn't "pass" if the psychiatrist spent hours screening me or subjected me to an immense battery of tests and looked closely for descrepancies, but typically that isn't going to happen. And this holds true not just for psychiatry but for all of medicine. I could have dozens of symptoms pointing to a brain tumor, but if I didn't tell the doctors about them, how would they know? Doctors aren't wizards. They're human beings who depend upon the data given them to make a diagnosis. If the data is withheld or hidden, they can't intuit it.
poster:Iansf
thread:208072
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040811/msgs/378344.html