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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
A medicine travels everywhere in the body and only does something where there is something for it to work through. So the question is not whether a drug is strong but whether what it works through is present in the part of you that is struggling. Held in mind, that turns a failed trial of something into information rather than a verdict on the person.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
It is guidance and healing for those who have faith, but the ears of the disbelievers are heavy (Quran 41:44). Even revelation is described as meeting something in the person who receives it, so the idea that a remedy needs something to meet is not a strange one.
فصلت
وَلَوۡ جَعَلۡنَٰهُ قُرۡءَانًا أَعۡجَمِيࣰّ ا لَّقَالُواْ لَوۡلَا فُصِّلَتۡ ءَايَٰتُهُۥٓۖ ءَا۬عۡجَمِيࣱّ وَعَرَبِيࣱّۗ قُلۡ هُوَ لِلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ هُدࣰ ى وَشِفَآءࣱۚ وَٱلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤۡمِنُونَ فِيٓ ءَاذَانِهِمۡ وَقۡرࣱ وَهُوَ عَلَيۡهِمۡ عَمًىۚ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ يُنَادَوۡنَ مِن مَّكَانِۭ بَعِيدࣲ
If We had made it a foreign Quran, they would have said, ‘If only its verses were clear! What? Foreign speech to an Arab?’ Say, ‘It is guidance and healing for those who have faith, but the ears of the disbelievers are heavy, they are blind to it, it is as if they are being called from a distant place.’
Qur’an 41:44read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
One well known analysis, which included trials that had never been published, found the advantage of antidepressants over placebo was modest overall and clearest in the people who were most severely ill. It has been argued over ever since and remains contested. It is still worth holding, because it sets expectations at a realistic size rather than a promised one.
Kirsch I, Deacon BJ, Huedo-Medina TB, Scoboria A, Moore TJ, Johnson BT. (2008). Initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration.. PLoS medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Something can only be changed where whatever changes it has something to hold on to.
Ask what symptom you are aiming at rather than what the diagnosis is called. Nothing anyone takes recognises a category; it acts on whatever is happening in the body.
Some anxiety medicines have no fast setting at all. They work on the receiving side of the system and take two to four weeks to show anything, so taking one in a bad moment does nothing and proves nothing.
If you have been given a drug from one category for a problem in another, it is fair to ask which part of it is doing the work. Often the useful effect is a side effect that has been borrowed.