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."

Comments

Shooting themselves in the foot

[Wonko the Sane]

Drug companies should never have started advertising directly to end users.

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

Or possible the patent is no longer in effect, so no one bothered to fudge any data this time? Perhaps they were too busy "gathering" data for new drugs?

Re:WTF

[je ne sais quoi]

The GP's article suggested another reason:

He goes on to talk about how placebo has become a crisis of the industry, but I have another explanation: it's not "placebo" that's the problem. If drugs in testing cannot outperform placebo, then the researches have done a good job of testing the drugs honestly. If the researchers are failing to develop drugs that beat placebo and the company's bottom line is suffering, it's not the fault of the sugar pill. Sometimes it's either difficult or impossible to develop an effective medication. Failure is inevitable. It's how science works. If the CEOs don't like it, they have to either make up the data, or find a new business model.

It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.

Re:WTF

[dintlu]

Alternately, the deluge of ads could be brain-washing Americans to think, "Without a little purple pill you'll feel bad," such that the illness itself is a nocebo effect, which placebos effectively nullify.

Re:WTF

[MrNaz]

Actually no, language is *not* what is defined by the lowest common denominator, if that were the case, then modern science would go out the window as every technical term in every paper completely lost all hope of having intelligible meaning in the anarchy of broken syntax.

Communication would be damn near impossible if every time I read a text I was not able to refer to a dictionary, but instead had to take a walk outside and poll all the halfwits hanging out the front of the local shopping mall what a given word means in a given context. I can imagine it now:

"Hey fellas, sorry to interrupt your skateboarding and pot smoking, but would you mind telling me what you understand by the word 'pontification'? I do apologize, but I have a term paper in linguistics due in a week and I need to bring my semantics up to date according to the current popular lexicon."

"Language evolves" is not the same as "Uneducated dipshits get to set standards".

Re:Personal Anecdote

[BitZtream]

AFAIK God hasn't been known to cause nausea, heart attack, or death as a side effect.

You haven't read much of the old testament have you?