In response to the CATIE studies, Lieberman (52) and others have argued that, given (i) the efficacy of individual drugs against placebo, (ii) the therapeutic equivalence among antipsychotics in CATIE studies, and (iii) clinician inclinations to match drugs with patients on the basis of their symptomatic responses, clinicians should be able to select among the widest array of treatment options. This argument combines untested assumptions (clinician inclinations) with CT-confirmed facts (equivalent efficacies) to construct expert clinical guidance (52). This guidance sets aside research-evidenced equivalent effectiveness of the antipsychotics to endorse the untested claim that the effectiveness of these drugs can be established in the clinic, as each clinician works with individual patients. If the interpretation of CATIE’s outcomes in fact depended on this assumption, then CATIE would more usefully have been designed to address the effects of antipsychotics in individual patients, how precisely and accurately these effects are quantified by clinicians, how practitioners use these estimates to optimize selections among antipsychotics for individual patients, and under what clinical care conditions antipsychotics are most effectively used with schizophrenic patients. CATIE investigated
