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Picking up on the discussion of science as truth versus story there was a great article in the Boston Globe two days ago about how the scientific community got the story of Prozac wrong. 

Apparently our old story of depression being caused by shortage of serotonin in the brain does not seem to be borne out by observation.  One of the first cracks in this theory came from observing the phenomenon of “Prozac lag”.   Prozac increases the amount of serotonin in the brain immediately, but it usually takes weeks for the effect of Prozac to be felt by patients.  

This led scientists to study other possible mechanisms in depression.  One possibility which was explored is that depression functions much like chronic stress in that during both neurons are deprived of the proteins they need to thrive. 

It’s a fascinating read and shows just how quickly a science story can be absorbed by a culture, even if the story turns out to not quite explain some pretty basic observations. I imagine that we will go through similar shifts in dealing with the topic of ADD drugs.

Read the full story here:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/06/head_fake/

Of course the history of medicine is filled with these kinds of stories.  The New York Times did a great piece on the science of epidemiology and some of the potentially awful mistakes of correlation the medical community has made over the years. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html