Owen, brilliant as always! A couple of considerations. In our field, efficacy describes the potential of an intervention to work in the clinical population, i.e. it's capacity, whereas effectiveness is used to indicate the actual results in the sample of interest. I might suggest that psychiatry is enamored with efficacy actually, in opposition to your thesis, and as such has largely sacrificed a consideration of effectiveness in actual humans living lives of suffering and joy, sometimes at the exact same time. Perhaps if the field spent a bit more time talking to patients with lived experience, engaging in shared decision making around PROs/PREMs, etc that might change? I'd also ask you consider another noteworthy Nobel Prize in Medicine for neurobiology of behavior within psychiatry, that of Eric Kandel, who won in 2000 for work related to the storage of memory in neurons, and is a prolific researcher and writer across the neuropsychiatric spectrum.
It’s the challenge of partially effective treatments that come with serious risks... when dealing with treatment of serious & persistent mental illness, the situation is not unlike non-curative chemotherapy in oncology.
Owen, brilliant as always! A couple of considerations. In our field, efficacy describes the potential of an intervention to work in the clinical population, i.e. it's capacity, whereas effectiveness is used to indicate the actual results in the sample of interest. I might suggest that psychiatry is enamored with efficacy actually, in opposition to your thesis, and as such has largely sacrificed a consideration of effectiveness in actual humans living lives of suffering and joy, sometimes at the exact same time. Perhaps if the field spent a bit more time talking to patients with lived experience, engaging in shared decision making around PROs/PREMs, etc that might change? I'd also ask you consider another noteworthy Nobel Prize in Medicine for neurobiology of behavior within psychiatry, that of Eric Kandel, who won in 2000 for work related to the storage of memory in neurons, and is a prolific researcher and writer across the neuropsychiatric spectrum.
It’s the challenge of partially effective treatments that come with serious risks... when dealing with treatment of serious & persistent mental illness, the situation is not unlike non-curative chemotherapy in oncology.
Outstanding, Owen. Let's chat again this Sunday. Ping me when ready.