RT by @recover2renew: ”In any other line of work outside of medicine if customers consistently report the same problem they would investigate immediately- sadly this often doesn't happen in medicine.”
”In any other line of work outside of medicine if customers consistently report the same problem they would investigate immediately- sadly this often doesn't happen in medicine.”
Daniel Owens (@dsowens17)
That's not how this works- you're shifting the burden of proof. If someone develops severe, life-altering symptoms after stopping a drug, the default assumption should be that the drug caused it -and the burden is on clinicians to rule that out, not leap straight to a psychiatric explanation. But that step is routinely skipped. All the systemic reviews of misdiagnosis for FND can't tell us much without ruling out iatrogenic harm first- it's like claiming that air pollution is the cause of lung cancer in patients without ruling out whether they smoke or not first.
— http://x.com/dsowens17/status/1952334644789063855#m
TThe ‘no data’ argument is the usual ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’ fallacy. Your thinking is based on the false assumption that if something is actually happening there will be data to back it up. But what happens when the system simply isn’t collecting the data? It’s the classic ‘we don’t think this is a thing so we won’t look for it” circular reasoning so common in this area. In any other line of work outside of medicine if customers consistently report the same problem they would investigate immediately- sadly this often doesn't happen in medicine. That is not to say that we don’t need highly quality studies- we absolutely do and good data is invaluable but using the absence of such data as evidence that something is not happening is not how science works.
I highly recommend informing yourself of how previous iatrogenic scandals have played out. You will see the same tired argument you make here trotted out again and again about anecdotes. It happened with the opioid crisis, tobacco and lung cancer, benzodiazepine dependence, valproate in pregnancy. A mass cluster of anecdotes saying the same thing is a very strong signal that something is going on. Strangely though there is very little appetite to investigate that signal further. I wonder why.
Source: Marion Brown (Psychotherapist ) Published 03 Nov 2026 Imported 04 Nov 2026 Relevancy: Not reviewed
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