> To summarize, antidepressants do work: their effect is statistically significant. This is deliberately misleading. You just explained that statistical signif

> To summarize, antidepressants do work: their effect is statistically significant. This is deliberately misleading. You just explained that statistical significance is not clinical significance, but saying "antidepressants do work" strongly implies that they subjectively improve a person's state. These are words you chose, words that contradict the study's conclusion with respect to human subjects in all but the most severely depressed. > But they don't work very well: their effect is not clinically significant in any but the most severe cases. This is like saying, "the skydiver was perfectly all right until he hit the ground." It's misleading. If he used language like this, a clinician could be accused of unethically misleading his patients. The reason for the wide gap between statistical and clinical significance is to guard against the distorting effect of self-reporting, always a risk in a study like this. I want to repeat what you said above, but broken down: (a) "To summarize, antidepressants do work:" (b) "their effect is statistically significant." But according to your own analysis, item (a) does not -- cannot -- acquire its authority from item (b), for the reason that statistical significance doesn't lead to the claim that these drugs "work" in the commonly accepted sense, i.e. subjective improvement in a human subject. I refer again to the difference between science and pseudoscience I quoted earlier -- pseudoscientists seek confirmation, scientists seek falsification. The outcome for the layman? If a scientist cannot falsify something, it acquires a small bit of temporary credibility, but if a pseudoscientist says something works, well, read the study behind the words.