Alternatives to Mainstream Medical Treatment Call for Recognizing Ethnic,
Social Differences
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 26, 2005
When UCLA researchers reviewed the best available studies of
psychiatric drugs for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and
attention deficit disorder, they found that the trials had involved
9,327 patients over the years. When the team looked to see how many
patients were Native Americans, the answer was . . .
Zero.
"I don't know of a single trial in the last 10 to 15 years that has
been published regarding the efficacy of a pharmacological agent in
treating a serious mental disorder in American Indians," said Spero
Manson, a psychiatrist who heads the American Indian and Alaska Native
Programs at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in
Aurora. "It is stunning."
Native Americans are not the only group for whom psychiatrists write
prescriptions with fingers crossed, the researchers at the University
of California at Los Angeles found as they reviewed the data for a
U.S. surgeon general's report: Of 3,980 patients in antidepressant
studies, only two were Hispanic. Of 2,865 schizophrenia patients,
three were Asian. Among 825 patients in bipolar disorder or manic
depression studies, there were no Hispanics or Asians. Blacks were
better represented, but even their numbers in any one study were too
small to tell doctors anything meaningful.
In all, just 8 percent of the patients studied were minorities.
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/25/AR2005062500982.html>
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