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Placebos Work -- Even Without Deception
An anonymous reader writes "For most of us, the 'placebo effect' is synonymous with the power of positive thinking; it works because you believe you're taking a real drug. But a new study rattles this assumption. Researchers at Harvard Medical School's Osher Research Center and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have found that placebos work even when administered without the seemingly requisite deception. The study was published on December 22 in PLoS ONE."
If deception isn't necessary for placebos to work, does this mean the homeopathic medicine advocates can admit it's bullshit now?
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The lack of misinformation doesn't negate the plethora of ignorance - their probably thinking "they're just saying this is a placebo to test if it's really working".
A guy dressed in a white lab coat, doing an experiment, gives you some medicine and tells you: "This is a placebo. Trust me, there is no active component of any kind.". Then, as soon as you swallow the medicine he, and three other lab coated investigators watch you attentively for an hour, asking if you feel strange in any way.
What would be the chances of you believing them and having no doubts about the placebo nature of what you had taken?
The article suggests at the end that patients who responded to the placebos despite knowing that they were taking placebos might be benefiting from a "medical ritual", but I suspect it simpler than that. I suspect that the patients were just receiving some sort of psychosomatic benefit from having an actual human being pay attention to them for a little while. I can't prove it, but I suspect that a lot of modern chronic illnesses are psychosomatic and are a consequence of loneliness.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
From the actual study, the wording used to present the placebos to the patients seems to have been very carefully chosen to be utterly truthful, yet implicitly deceptive:
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I have allergies each spring. After I tried several different medications, I finally found one which advertises as "non-drowsy" - essentially a low dose of loratadine. I started taking it and yeah, it both worked and didn't make me feel sleepy all day long.
A couple of months later, I talked to a friend who is a doctor, and he told me (not knowing that I take that medication) that clinical studies for the medication showed that it worked for about 50% of people who took the drug, as well as for around 50% of people who were on placebo (I can't remember if it was 50, but the percentage was about the same). I read some more upon it, and the conclusion most knowledgeable people made was that the dosage of loratadine in the drug is too low, and that it works only as a placebo.
Knowing what I know, I still take that medication and it still helps me. Perhaps the low dosage really works for me, but more likely, I keep being fooled by a placebo I know about...
I'm cured by just reading about these amazing placebos!
You do realize they almost all of the 'natural' remedies are made by big pharma, right? As is most vitamins.
Which kind of removes the 'Big Pharma' argument.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
As pointed out by Orac, things are nowhere as simple here as they've been presented. There was still an establishment of expectation of the treatment working, which is exactly one would expect would elicit the placebo effect.
Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines. It’d be interesting to have a third group who were given the placebo pills and instructed to not take them, but instead to open up their medicine cabinet twice a day, look at their bottle of placebo pills, and think about all the people who had taken them and got imaginary benefits from them. I.e. don’t take the placebo pills – they don’t work – but think about it, since it appears to be the thought that counts. Literally.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
the guy who died from homeopathic medicine?
Yeah, he forgot to take it and overdosed!
Butseriouslyfolks... I'd like to see someone argue that homeopathy DOES work if you do a placebo-controlled trial. A homeopathic placebo-controlled trial, which means the placebo is actually undiluted. Hey, 100% of the patients given placebo arsenic died, and only 50% of the patients who took the diluted version! Whaddayaknow: a diluted dose of arsenic cures arsenic poisoning.
You don't have to take the word of the magazine as to what is in the article - you can read it for yourself
Conveniently enough the P in PLoS stands for Public - as in you can download the articles from anywhere without paying for a subscription.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'd need to see a cite for your claim.
Just look up the results for any drug clinical trial, and you'll see objective clinical results in the placebo arm of the trial. Give somebody a statin and it will lower their LDL by 30%, but give them a placebo and it will probably drop it around 5-10%. No need to ask the patient how they're feeling, just take a blood sample and send it to a lab, all in a blinded trial where nobody doing the testing knows how it will turn out.
Placebos achieve all kinds of documented clinical outcomes. You could probably improve the lives of poor people tremendously while not raising healthcare costs a dime if we just gave them all placebos for their ails. The question is which is more unethical - letting poor people die because we're unwilling to spend money on their care, or letting fewer poor people die by lying about the fact that we're unwilling to spend money on their care... If you look at it objectively, that's a pretty potent question. Of course, people will point to the third option - simply spending more money on their care, but if we were willing to do that we wouldn't be talking about the topic in the first place, and there will always be a limit beyond which we could still gain marginal improvements by using placebos (give somebody a statin, and a "Super Statin" placebo).
No. You’re wrong. Just stop.
For example:
The same placebo can cause two exactly opposite effects on heart rhythm and blood pressure – both measurable, real things – depending on what sort of drug the person thought the placebo was.
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
EVERY test I have read about(100s) regard placebo effects show no real effect. Whether that placebo was administered by pill, fake surgery, acupuncturist, chiropractor, or prayer
You've missed some really important and classic placebo studies then. Google "placebo opiate production" and see what you'll find. There is ample evidence that placebos are capable of increasing endogenous endorophin production, which is why they are particularly effective against pain and inflamation.
This effect of placebos has been known for decades, so it kind of harms your credibility that you aren't aware of it.
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