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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."
Drug companies should never have started advertising directly to end users.
Oblig. article from The Onion
Or possible the patent is no longer in effect, so no one bothered to fudge any data this time?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?
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."
Statistics are like bikinis.
What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is critical.
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
That sill doesn't explain why placebos are now nearly twice as effective as ~1990, but this paragraph from the article might be a factor:
Potential trial volunteers in the US have been deluged with ads for prescription medications since 1997, when the FDA amended its policy on direct-to-consumer advertising. The secret of running an effective campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi's Jim Joseph told a trade journal last year, is associating a particular brand-name medication with other aspects of life that promote peace of mind: "Is it time with your children? Is it a good book curled up on the couch? Is it your favorite television show? Is it a little purple pill that helps you get rid of acid reflux?" By evoking such uplifting associations, researchers say, the ads set up the kind of expectations that induce a formidable placebo response.
The frequent ads from the companies are effectively brain-washing Americans to think, "All you need is a little purple pill to feel good," and so the mere act of swallowing that pill, even if it's just sugar, becomes twice as effective as previously.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I'm the author of the Wired article, and I would encourage people to read the article itself before taking Peter's post on Science-Based Medicine as the final word on the subject. Peter's blog runs on two sites, and if you visit the other thread here -- http://scienceblogs.com/whitecoatunderground/2009/09/placebo_is_not_what_you_think.php -- you'll see that Peter's well-informed readers offered up many citations supporting my central thesis that he seemed unaware of, many of which were contained in my article. I know that words like "crappy" and "smackdown" feel really bracing to post or read on a blog, but they're no substitute for science-based medicine. Thanks for the link, ScuttleMonkey.
Actually, when it comes to psychiatric drugs, they often do. In many cases, it's all in your head, so to speak. If you can convince yourself that a medication is working for such things, you will get better, and if you convince yourself that it isn't working, you will stay the same or get worse, whether you're taking a drug that tries to fix the underlying chemical imbalance or not. Why? Because ultimately your brain is controlling the regulation of those neurotransmitters. It can compensate for any "fix" the drugs make, and can similarly correct its own regulation if you convince it that the levels should be improving. Indeed, in the field of psychiatric drugs, it would actually be surprising if such a strong placebo effect did not occur, assuming that people generally believe that psychiatric drugs are effective.
Unfortunately, too many doctors, including psychiatrists, are too eager to prescribe a pill rather than taking the time to get to the root of the problem and fix what's really wrong. The good news is that prescribing a placebo may be just as effective for many of their less serious patients, but without the harmful side effects.... :-)
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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.
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".
I hate printers.
I know you were moded Funny, but I think there could be some bit of truth to your statement.
Especially when the drugs are meant to treat depression, this could be part of the effect. We have record levels of depression in this country. Could part of that be due to pharmaceutical advertising?
You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
No, the guy who wrote that article is wrong. He is using "placebo" where he should be saying "control". A control is what you use to measure the difference between normality and the thing you are testing. In medicine, this may or may not involve a placebo (which means a "pleaser"). For example, I can give 1000 people my new drug, and put another 1000 people in a control group, with no drug. However, I may worry that some of the improvement in my patients is due to the psychological effect of popping a pill; I therefore may give the control group a fake pill to take, called a placebo. If I have enough funding, I may even have three groups: one with the real drug, one control group with the placebo, and one true control group with absolutely nothing. This will often produce three levels of improvement.
A control cannot be described as strong or weak, but a placebo given as part of a control certainly can be. Although it is something designed to have no real effect, the fact is that every aspect of the treatment situation (the colour of the pills, frequency of treatment, the crispness of the white coats...) alters the strength of the pleasing effect, which can have major consequences for health and well-being.
You haven't read much of the old testament have you?
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The 'original' (as in, the ones used at the time the placebo effect was becoming known) placebos were sugar pills and so sugar has become associated with placebos as a result. Modern placebos are generally inert in the context of the study.