Savonarola wrote:Darrel wrote: --Bill Maher
Disclaimer: Any medical information disseminated by Bill Maher should be taken with several grains of salt. Remember that he believes the medicine he wants to believe and rejects the medicine he wants to reject.
DOUG
Yes, but in this case he is just stating a fact: a study did show this. So either he is telling the truth or he is not.
He is a crank about medicine--AND he is overzealous about the negative effects of American food (but not by much), AND he is a member of PETA (which is sometimes overzealous too, but they do a
lot of good work--but in this case he is correct, that a study did reach this conclusion. In fact, more than one study, so it is not clear which one he is talking about, unless we just go with the most recent major news source, which cites a 2007 study.
Is Exercise the Best Drug for Depression?
By Laura Blue Saturday, Jun. 19, 2010
...Subsequent trials have repeated these results, showing again and again that patients who follow aerobic-exercise regimens see improvement in their depression comparable to that of those treated with medication, and that both groups do better than patients given only a placebo. But exercise trials on the whole have been small, and most have run for only a few weeks; some are plagued by methodological problems. Still, despite limited data, the trials all seem to point in the same direction: exercise boosts mood. It not only relieves depressive symptoms but also appears to prevent them from recurring.
...The trials on exercise have all been smaller, perhaps in part because they need no government approval. "If you look at FDA standards [for evidence], it's not clear that exercise would meet that standard," says James Blumenthal, the Duke University professor of medical psychology who ran Duke's 1999 exercise study as well as a 2007 follow-up with more than 200 patients, which Blumenthal believes is the largest such trial to date.
Read more:
Here.
Exercise on par with drugs for aiding depression (2007)
Regular exercise may work as well as medication in improving symptoms of major depression, researchers have found.
In a study of 202 depressed adults, investigators found that those who went through group-based exercise therapy did as well as those treated with an antidepressant drug. A third group that performed home-based exercise also improved, though to a lesser degree.
Importantly, the researchers found, all three groups did better than a fourth group given a placebo -- an inactive pill identical to the antidepressant.
While past studies have suggested that exercise can ease depression symptoms, a criticism has been that the research failed to compare exercise with a placebo. This leaves a question as to whether the therapy, per se, was responsible for the benefit.
The new findings bolster evidence that exercise does have a real effect on depression, according to the researchers.
See here.
Study: Exercise Has Long-Lasting Effect on Depression (1999, report in 2000)
After demonstrating that 30 minutes of brisk exercise three times a week is just as effective as drug therapy in relieving the symptoms of major depression in the short term, medical center researchers have now shown that continued exercise greatly reduces the chances of the depression returning.
Here."We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
