Bingo!

But that's a huge point to prove. As obvious as it may sound, it's evidence that validating patients and their concerns may be among the best things we can do as physicians. It's absolutely not billable, so many docs don't do it - instead focusing on seeing the next person quickly or doing another billable procedure.

Maybe with more studies aimed at understanding the effect of doctor-patient interactions, we'll start reimbursing MD's for what works and patients find valuable.

But he has a point. Several psychiatric drugs have been shown to be no better or worse than placebo. We didn't hear about it because these negative trials were suppressed by the drug companies. They only published the positive ones - do enough studies and one will work!

Even the open placebo used in this study appeared as good as the leading therapy for IBS (although they weren't compared head-to-head).

This is fascinating to me.It proves how much we don't know about how people work.

As a physician I have on several occasions wanted to prescribe a placebo, knowing that time would be the best remedy and that simply feeling like the patient is doing something might improve their outlook immediately. Of course, I consider that misleading and unethical. To know that it might work even if you are up front about it is amazing. I'm not sure that it would work outside of a clinical trial though. I'd love to know how/if it really works.

Several possibilities -

1) Just a statistical fluke - it won't be born out in repeat studies.
2) Specific only to disorders like IBS which has a highly variable course, subjective symptoms, and is hard to diagnose. This isn't going to work with leukemia.
3) An example of "active" intervention where a person feels like they are being helped to help themselves even if they cognitively don't believe it. It's what underlies the "healing touch" in medicine and maybe even the power of meditation/prayer (praying for yourself that is, not being in a coma and having others pray for you).

I also don't know how they got the study past the scientific review board, which I thought, would laugh them out of the room.

What if we ran universities like Wikipedia?

Then education would work like the media does today. The loudest or hottest or most in-line with what you already think "professors" would dominate those that actually know more about their field. You wouldn't be learning as much as concreting your world view - exactly the opposite of what higher education should do.

In fact, why not skip the university concept and meld education into the media entirely? Sign me up for the Daily Show Community College.

Daddy - why didn't our ancestors start working on a way to colonize the solar system before the Sun started expanding?

Because your great-great-great-great-google-grandpa was really into NASCAR and porn and couldn't spare the dough to fund our species-saving research.

Oh - I see. I'm glad he had his priorities straight. The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?

Retarded headline. It would be as valid to analyze his iPhone to see how electronics deal with toxins. Sequencing his genome is a publicity stunt. Nothing more.

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand n base numbering system, those who don't, those who think it is n-1 base system, those who think it is n-2 base system, ... , and those who mistake it for binary (n-k=2).

This is exactly where I hoped they were going. Ben Linus was a perfect example of that. He was an shit person - a total manipulative, scheming opportunist with no morality. Yet even he redeems himself to some degree. The writers could have made it more obvious - saying that Linus is staying to atone for kidnapping the Frenchwoman's daughter and letting her die later on - that he needed to reconcile with his father - and the like. It would have been nice to know that these richly developed characters still had life to live with the benefit of who they had become after their time on the Island.

The cancer concern is a legitimate one. These p21 knockouts are lab mice kept in clean conditions. They may not develop cancers in a three year span, but that demonstrates little about the oncogenic potential in humans.

I'm assuming there is some evolutionary reason for curtailing a vigorous healing response. It maybe to reduce the cancer rate, but it could just as simply be something else very important - regulation of immune response for example.

One potentially useful experiment would be to challenge these mice with carcinogen (like ENU) and see what their cancer rate is compared to controls. Alternatively, you could use genetic means (insertion of oncogenes or mating to mice with knocked out tumor suppressor genes) to see if the cancers they develop are more aggressive or more likely to metastasize. In any case, this is a very cool finding.