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Placebos Are Getting More Effective
Wired is reporting that the well-known "placebo effect" seems to be increasing as time goes on. Fewer and fewer medications are actually making it past drug trials since they are unable to show benefits above and beyond a placebo. "It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time."
Keep in mind, grammar nazis out there, people define the language. Possum is spelled without the O now because it was stupid and most people forgot it. Likewise, placebo means whatever the majority of folks say it means. Most people think sugar pill, so it IS a damn sugar pill. Shut up.
No shit, Sherlock? Guess what: We already knew that, and yet still understood the article. Because we knew what was meant. We took for granted, what you highlighted, and parsed the article in that context.
You act like a typical white coat, expecting that everyone around you is an idiot, and you're the all-knowing god!
So who's the idiot here? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.