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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."
It seems to me that placebos aren't getting better at fixing people, just that statisticians are becoming more efficient at modifying the numbers. Soon they will rule the universe.
Oblig. article from The Onion
Soon, the only drug we will need in Placebo(tm). This is to be expected since it has appeared in more clinical trials for more ailments than any other drug in history.
"His name was James Damore."
I believe it. Have you seen antidepressant ads? The morose horn section alone is enough to make you want to pack it in.
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