Letters to the Editor

• Closed Minded Arrogance

  [Read the article: Why "placebo" is not a dirty word]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  To the Editor:

  In my mid-Twenties, a bit less than 20 years ago, I was afflicted with and suffered from very severe and extremely debilitating clinical depression. Among its effects on me were extreme anhadonia, a loss of visceral emotional feelings, severe anxiety, loss of normal sexual function, not being able to cry or sweat, and an inability to sleep for several consecutive hours, i.e. normally. Among the real-life implications of this for me were losing my job, not being able to hold another job or be hired, not going to law school which was what the trajectory of my life was at that time, and never becoming a member of the Upper Middle Class, my reference socioeconomic group.

  I remember doing the rounds with the psychiatrists and trying their feeble and largely ineffective medications and their evaluations based on the most ephemeral, yet supposingly scientific criterion. As one who was forced to carry the burden of this severe illness, I understood most immediately that the psychiatrists were just guessing, and really had no true insight or understanding of just how truly debilitating and life-paralyzing such a state-of-being can be. Nor could they understand what it meant for the person afflicted or his own novel ways of understanding it and experiencing it. Their drugs which included Lithium, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Prozac. I tried them all with minimal benefit.

  I do know something about the Placebo effect but I see it in a different way that that of this article's author. The first psychiatric drug with which I experimented was called Wellbutrin, which really had no effect on my depression at all, not for the better nor for the worse. Nevertheless, I wanted it to work, so I imagined that it did. I even imagined that I felt better. But imagining that I felt better was not the same as actually feeling better and still quite a distance from actually being cured.

  Drugs Zoloft and Prozac were more effective, but not to a degree which made my life "normal" of substantially improving the quality of my life. I didn't expect Zoloft or Prozac to work, but I experienced an effect: improved viscerality, a more elevated mood, and a hope that it was finally over. This was not the placebo effect because I didn't expect it to work and because t was obvious to me that these drugs were doing more for me then Wellbutrin did.

  It wasn't, and the initial euphoria I experienced at the prospect of being finally cured gave way to the frustration that while drug Zoloft and drug Prozac provided some relief, it was not a real answer and it was not a real cure. My condition remained unacceptable to me.

  Determined, and not willing to accept psychiatric knowledge as the ultimate knowledge of my condition, I searched for other treatment possibilities. I sought out Chinese Medicine and began treatments with Five Element Acupuncture. I engaged in a series of accupunture treatments and while the treatment process was slow, it really was working. It was only a matter of time, perhaps a long time, until I would be completely cured.

  Chinese Medicine and the Five Element Acupuncture treatments have improved my condition and brought me closer to the visceral here and now than any psychiatric drug or western medicine as a whole. It is not that I believe that it has and is helping me, it actually did and is and I resent the arrogant condescension and closed mindedness of anyone who claims to know the experiences of my spirit and body better than I do.

  Sincerely yours,

  Arthur C. Hurwitz

  Permalink Thursday, July 31, 2008 09:06 PM