Placebos Are Getting More Effective 349
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."
WTF (Score:4, Informative)
You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. [scienceblogs.com]
There are plenty of other reasons for this to be occurring. Better testing procedures among them.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:WTF (Score:5, Funny)
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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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.
There is a flip side to this study-
The rise of the "effectiveness" of placebo's might simply indicate a rise in purely psychosomatic, and/or mis-diagnosed "illnesses"... therefore the data would end up looking like the placebo's are more effective when in fact it is simply that more people are either thinking they are sick, or being told they are sick, when they are in all reality, healthy. So of course an actual working drug would have little more effect than a placebo... because there isn't anything to cu
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
The rise of the "effectiveness" of placebo's might simply indicate a rise in purely psychosomatic, and/or mis-diagnosed "illnesses"...
The great thing about this, in a properly controlled double blind test is that it doesn't matter. The real pill gets the same psychological boost as the placebo. Both pills have the same base line. Now the difference between the two pills is due to the differences in the active ingredients.
This all sounds like total bullshit by pharmacological companies to escape from some cheating they were doing back in the 1990s or something.
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LoB
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
Because if you have an imaginary concocted ailment like restless leg syndrome or hyperactivity, then the imaginary effects of a sugar pill are going to work well to alleviate the imaginary symptoms of the imaginary disease.
Pharmaceutical companies define disease these days. They advertise diseases and they push doctors to prescribe their poisonous ineffective chemicals to treat the advertised diseases.
You could probably find a correlation between the number of advertised diseases like restless leg syndrome and this so called "placebo effect".
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Did you read about how some of the older drugs wouldn't have made it past the trials today?
I think this might have to do with the FDA's mailed fist choking off anything to do with 'snake oil' for years - we've raised generations that expect medications to be safe and effective, and therefore they are, by golly(placebo effect).
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not anything to do with the placebo, it's that the drugs that are being developed currently don't do anything.
Did you read about how some of the older drugs wouldn't have made it past the trials today?
I think this might have to do with the FDA's mailed fist choking off anything to do with 'snake oil' for years - we've raised generations that expect medications to be safe and effective, and therefore they are, by golly(placebo effect).
I love it. Gullibility by design (TM), the new prescription. The disturbing part of the equation is that price is part of the effect, so I'd expect that a 50$ pill could have a bigger placebo effect than a 5$ pill of identical composition, provided that the patients know it.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
The question is not if old drugs would pass modern test but if old drugs still pass old tests. Old drugs not making it pass modern tests can mean just better tests.
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placebo + water supply == control group snafu (Score:2)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not unthinkable that placebos could be having a more pronounced results than they have in the past. In the Prozac example, psychiatry related drugs are especially prone to placebo effects. Given that the average citizen knows a lot more about these drugs than they did 10+ years ago due to ads and the media, they're more likely to believe it'll work for them than people used to.
Changes attitudes towards drugs having an effect on placebos isn't something that should be dismissed offhand like that writer seems to be doing.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
No shit, Sherlock? Guess what: We already knew that, and yet still understood the article. Because we knew what was meant. We took for granted, what you highlighted, and parsed the article in that context.
You act like a typical white coat, expecting that everyone around you is an idiot, and you're the all-knowing god!
So who's the idiot here? ^^
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No shit, Sherlock?
Sherlock was actually the sleuth from some fictional stories written long ago. So it's inaccurate to use "Sherlock" here.
If I hear one more person use "Sherlock" in the wrong context, my brain is going to explode because they don't know proper usage.
The term you are looking for is "fucktard".
Learn English.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
The placebo affect can also be caused by pride. "I paid $300 for these pills, they work so much better than the generics!" It's the same reason that I can buy an expensive computer/phone/car with the same features as your off-brand, but still act like it's much better.
But I'm sure that has little to do with testing where you don't have to pay... just saying, in general.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
I've read the article (Score:3, Insightful)
I see a fundamental issue with the central storyline, which is that drug companies are seeing a stronger placebo response in drug trials. But drug trials are not designed to measure the placebo response; they are designed to measure the drug against the placebo. It would be like comparing 100 different scales for accuracy, and then going back into the data set to try to discover any differences in the standard weights that were used. A placebo can either be a control or an effect; you can't run one experime
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That guy misses the point.
There is an apparent change here, evidenced by the fact that new tests of old drugs are giving poorer relative results while giving similar absolute results.
It may be due to better testing methods. It may be that there was fraud in the earlier tests which has been gradually weeded out. It may be that people in studies are culturally more eager to please and so are (consciously or unconsciously) making larger lifestyle changes when they enter the study. It may be (as stipulated i
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. [scienceblogs.com]
There are plenty of other reasons for this to be occurring. Better testing procedures among them.
Perhaps the real reason efficacy of trial drugs has declined is Big Pharma is trying to treat conditions that aren't actual problems? "Over-active bladder syndrome" comes to mind immediately -- stop drinking caffeine, only drink water when you're thirsty, problem solved.
As the above URL observes:
"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."
I think the CEOs have done exactly that. It's pronounced "advertise di
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. [scienceblogs.com]
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Your post partly just repeats what I said was the purpose of placebo, and partly expresses an overly narrow view of the matter.
The scienceblogs.com article equated placebo with control, and I am extricating them. You are wrong to say the only meaningful drug test is drug versus placebo.
Interesting data have also been gleaned from situations where people receive treatment but don't know it. Their outcomes can then be compared with people who receive treatment and know it, people who don't receive treatment
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Placebo's were not invented for use in clinical trials, they existed hundreds of years before them. They refer to medicines given "more to please the patient than to benefit them".
In clinical trials, it has been shown that sugar pills, when compared to nothing, alleviate pain. Additionally, different forms and colors of inactive pills have varying efficacy. There is also a correlation between price and efficacy.
The effect demonstrated by this, the psychological effect whereby the thought that you have recei
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Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
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.... :-)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
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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
How do you think a word enters a dictionary - and why do you think its meaning changes over time?
There is another way of building a dictionary:
handing the work over to an often acutely nationalist academic elite whose wo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember the day my world came crashing down and I realized Webster's was basically useless. It was when I was gently trying to explain to someone that pronouncing "ask" as "ax" has no bearing on reality - for God's sake, it's a three letter word, how could you ever confuse the order of letters?! So I pulled down Webster's to prove my point:
Main Entry: ask
Pronunciation: \'ask, 'ask; dialect 'aks\
Fuck.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you went and read a blog post by a skateboarding pot smoker, you most likely WOULD have to use ubandictionary.com or similar to understand it.
There's a good chance he would need to do the same to read various texts written by you.
Both of you could read the majority of each others' written works anyway. This is your dreaded "lowest common denominator" at work. If it bothers you, perhaps you should make more effort to keep up with the new terms continually entering common parlance.
Yes, this is how langua
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No, they really don't.
Look again:
"Uneducated dipshits get to set standards".
No, they don't set standards, they set norms in the sense of "typical patterns". Just because your usual person thinks "schizophrenia" means "multiple personality disorder" doesn't make it the standard definition. There are a shitload of solecisms in common use. Their commonality doesn't give them authority. Sure, their commonality gives them practical weight in that you have to translate when talking with an ignoramus, but that's not the same thing as setting a "standar
Re: (Score:3)
I think maybe what I said about standards vs. norms was not clear.
Your argument that language evolves is correct. Your argument that dictionaries did not come before initial language is correct. Your argument that popularity encourages further use is correct.
The conclusion that language is thus "standardized" is not correct. If there were no distinction between different kinds of language we would have no such terms to make the distinctions. "Literary language", "jargon", "vernacular", "standard languag
Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:5, Insightful)
Drug companies should never have started advertising directly to end users.
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would be curious if testing a group of Americans and a group of Europeans will give different strength placebo effects.
What the hell would you test against? A placebo placebo?
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The test for two population would be simply to find how what is the ratio of the placebo effect in each. With that I mean take the 2 population, for a number of different illness. Offer them each the placebo, and see, for each of the illness, what's the ratio of people that it helps. With this kind of test, you could even differentiate between type of illness, thus seeing if the advertisement or way of life were causing the most change.
Re:Shooting themselves in the foot (Score:5, Informative)
It does. Read the article.
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USA & New Zealand are the only 2 "first world" countries that allow such advertising.
The US changed a law back in the late 90s which opened the floodgates for this crap.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And frozen pizza manufacturers...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted the commerce clause has been pushed to rather ridiculous limits, but corporations have had no small part in pushing it in that direction. They would much rather have on
Grunt (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Grunt (Score:5, Funny)
What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is critical.
Or not. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Or not. (Score:4, Interesting)
Urgh, what a crappy article. He dismisses the well-documented placebo effect - out of ignorance presumably.
Believing (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest problem is that if well our brain could control somewhat our body, i.e. lowering pain, in other fields reality could be strongly against what our brain feels. Unfortunately the only example that comes to my mind right now is the "safest operating system on earth", signal that im accepting all the other placebos.
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Yes. This is why we have a procedure we call "science" that attempts to take our subjective biases out of the equation. There are no shortage of examples where people have absolutely convinced themselves of things that aren't true.
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You can dig a lot of papers, see certifications, other qualified opinions and so on in front of a "science" claim, or just be
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Wait, are you suggesting that OpenBSD is safe through the placebo effect?
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[I]n what other fields are we swallowing "placebos" giving us the feeling that they work?
One of the big ones is surgery for pain - especially back pain. The thing is, you don't want to have people go through the risks of surgery just to open them up and do nothing and have them as a control group. Also, if you did open a person up and not perform the surgery, any doctor looking at the X-rays could immediately tell that the procedure was not performed, so no double-blind studies. So, a lot of surgical procedures are not exposed to the gold standard of scientific medicine, the double-blind contro
Larger sample means different sample (Score:4, Interesting)
People are more and more diagnosed with depression. A high placebo effect in treating depression is, in my uneducated opinion, at least partially indicative of over-diagnosis. While in the past only the truly sick were diagnosed as depressed, today perhaps some of the patients aren't really that depressed, and thus can be treated with placebo/happy thoughts. To what degree is depression caused by "wrong" behavioral and mental patterns, and to what degree is it born of a chemical imbalance? Of course, they may cause each other, but I do believe that some depression cases are not that deep-seated. If it's a deep, recurring or continuous depression, then use real drugs that changes brain chemistry and how the brain functions. If it's not that bad, a pep talk and placebo just might push the brain towards solving it's own imbalances.
Oh, and I am/was depressed. Yes, I did use medication, Zoloft to be precise.
Patients entering trials are different (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's look at multiple sclerosis for example. When the initial medications were tested (betaseron, refib, copaxone) the majority of patients entering the trials did not have the option to go onto approved therapies and there only hope of therapy was to enter a trial. Now, as a physician, if I have a patient who is at higher risk of progressing from multiple sclerosis,
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Placebos future (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Placebos future (Score:4, Funny)
That is a dangerous idea. Over-use of placebos could lead to the evolution of placebo-resistant bacteria! Its happened with antibiotics, it could happen with placebo, too!! Worse, the resistance to placebos could spread from pharmaceutical placebos to more common cures!!!
Be afraid!!!! The Pharma industry would love to destroy traditional placebo-based remedies as chicken soup, a nice cup of tea, a double Scotch or "kissing it better" so they could sell you expensive pills as well!!!! Its a conspiracy!!!!!!
(Is that enough !!!!s to ensure that nobody thinks this is a serious comment?)
Re: (Score:2)
Placebo-resistant bacteria don't worry me: there are loads of ways of dealing with bacteria. But placebo-resistant viruses? The thought sends shivers down my spine. Imagine a common cold which can't be cured in a week by curling up in bed with a hot water bottle and a glass of lemon juice!
Re:Placebos future (Score:4, Informative)
Here [chestjournal.org] it is.
Also, simply inhaling warm vapors when you have a cold, and drinking warm things, especially stuff that 'sticks' to your throat thanks to the fat in the broth, has known medical benefits. That is, in fact, the entire point of cough drops and vapor-rub.
Oh, and don't underestimate the value of just eating something you're sick. Chicken soup provides proteins and carbohydrates in a form that even someone with the worst throat irritation can eat. While they would not, for example, want to eat a cheeseburger, which would have nearly the same nutritional content.
So at the very least, it is a) something warm to drink that will help clear nasal passages, that b) people can actually eat easily while sick and even coughing, and we know both those things already for a fact. Any additional chemical medical benefit is still hypothetical and being tested.
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On a serious note, you also forgot to mention that Placebo(tm) has likely cured more ailments and saved more lives than anything that pharmacology has developed, except for antibiotics.
We spend billions of dollars on pharma testing, and I always wondered, based on the strength of the placebo, if we'd be better off simply trying to figure out how to make that effect more significant.
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On a serious note, you also forgot to mention that Placebo(tm) has likely cured more ailments and saved more lives than anything that pharmacology has developed, except for antibiotics.
This is actually true: it's easy to forget that almost all of Big Pharma's money comes from stuff that is a tiny footnote to the major drugs of the 20th century. Compared to anti-biotics and vaccination, all this "blockbuster" stuff is in the statistical noise, and you could simply shut it off without materially affecting q
Ok, tin-foil idea here (Score:3, Interesting)
Is anyone testing these drugs being used on the tests??
Let's retest 'drug whose patent has expired' to see if it still works the same, so maybe when they find out it doesn't, hey, what about this new one?!
Maybe drug trials are becoming less compromised (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of people -- like the author of Talking Back to Prozac [psychologytoday.com] -- claim that some drug trials (especially for popular antidepressants) are compromised to the point that getting drugs like Prozac approved required requires a surprising amount of massaging of the data from drug trials just to get to the point where the drug seems to perform better than placebo. This New Scientist article from last year about how antidepressants' effects may have been exaggerated [newscientist.com], has a good definition of a particular form of publication bias [wikipedia.org] that is apparently common:
If that's true, then it's a gambit that would get less and less effective over time. Certainly, drug companies have a very large commercial interest in boosting the apparent effectiveness of their drugs by "enhancing" the results of their trials through selectively ignoring results they don't like. It does sound somewhat conspiracy theory-ish, but it seems like there's increasing evidence. Plus, if it's true that antidepressants are less effective than many doctors believed in the past, that's more evidence that the trials drew incorrect conclusions.
The most likely explanation (Score:2)
For me is that the original tests were "helped" to better numbers, as they meant billions of dollars in profits. Now the interest is not so big and so the numbers are closer to reality.
On the Flip Side (Score:3, Interesting)
People are getting more gullible. News at 11! (Score:2)
Why would this be surprizing? The scientific method and the belief that your beliefs need to be examined and their truth verified are recent inventions. For most of human history the vast majority always believed what they were told. As rationality is dying out, due to schooling and various other factors, so is skepticism and science. As time goes on, we can all expect people to increase blind faith and achieve whatever natural healing their bodies can provide.
Bad Science (Score:3, Insightful)
read 'Bad Science' by Ben Goldacre
turns out that the placebo effect is hugely influenced by beliefs. So - if people are in a trial to treat mental illness, then the placebo will be more effective now than it was 20 years ago simply because people on average believe that mental illnesses are treatable.
In a similar vein, Cimetidine (one of the first ulcer drugs) has become much less effective over time. It suffered a dramatic drop in success rate when the new ulcer drug Ranitidine came on to the market. It seems that as doctors stopped thinking of it as the best drug, it became less effective.
No big surprise that placebos are working better in some contexts. It doesn't show that the placebo effect is generally getting stronger though.
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turns out that the placebo effect is hugely influenced by beliefs.
The placebo effect is entirely caused by belief.
Actual evidence (Score:3, Informative)
Note that the only actual evidence for a more robust placebo effect referred to in the article is two studies looking at antidepressants. There are also a couple of anecdotes (from companies looking for a scapegoat for their failure) about Parkinson's and Crohn's, but that's hardly evidence.
It would be interesting if there was data for conditions that can be assessed objectively.
The article needed to be about two paragraphs and could certainly have stood to lose all the gushing about how powerful and neglected the placebo effect is. On the bright side, I see Wired is hiring people with no photography or design experience to generate their figures.
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While meta-analysis is often considered the poorest form of scientific evidence, I think you missed the point. The only evidence is for "increasing placebo effect" in metal illnesses. There was no evidence presented for any change in any illnesses that are not subjectively assessed. Since The assessment is subjective it's not at all surprising there would be variations in the placebo effect over time and location.
If people's tumors tend to shrink more on sugar pills in Europe than in America, or now as o
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HUH?!?!?!?!? Meta-analysis and Systematic reviews of RCTs are the top of the EBM pyramid. It is the best*** type of evidence there is.
Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Resources [duke.edu]
***: Meta-analysis and Systematic reviews of RCTs fall squarely under the garbage in/garbage out principle.
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I think your footnote sums it up nicely. Meta-analysis is great IF everyone else did their job properly and didn't make any mistakes, AND if the meta-study authors ALSO did a very good job. Otherwise, the meta-analysis is crap, frequently more misleading crap than the source because the N is inflated. Meta-analyses are subject to all the shortcomings of primary studies (because they rely on those studies) as well as problems with suppression of negative results (famously), coding errors, incomplete data
So (Score:2)
...
Could this be related? (Score:2)
I have suffered from chronic back pain for 25+ years. I was recently given a 'sample' drug by my doctor to determine if it was helpful.
The first dose was about 75% effective. It eliminated some of the pain but not all. The subsequent dosages (which included increasing the # of pills) had ZERO effect on pain levels. I do not doubt that placebo effect accounted for the initial pain relief, but I am usually very logical and calm about drug actions on my psyche.
I wonder if it is the diseases.. (Score:2)
But if you are measuring a drug's effect to cure something like say Restless Leg Syndrome, then surprise surprise the placebos work WONDERS.
When you have idiots defining healthy active children as suffering from attention deficit disorder, surprise surprise, a sugar pill (yeah, irony) works to cure them.
This particular case, the disease was depression. Depression is a real disease, but it is exa
How to test these new placebos (Score:2)
This is all very well but it comes from research involving Big Pharma products - bought and paid for!!! To test these new placebos we need some kind of control. Like, some kind of substance that has no effect on the patients so that we can use it to gauge the placebos agains......
Arse.
Another way to look at this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1. Of course we're still evolving and always will.
2. It's very likely nothing to do with our brains, and a lot to do with more rigorous testing.
Re:Human race evolving? (Score:4, Insightful)
2. It's very likely nothing to do with our brains, and a lot to do with more rigorous testing.
I don't buy the 'more rigorous testing' argument - I think that pre-supposes that testing was not performed diligently in the past. I think the most likely explanation is that the diagnoses were always flawed. Depression, mentioned in the blurb, for example has physical symptoms, but no known physical cause. My hunch is that many of the ailments we have are caused by factors outside the control of drugs, and it is the extent to which taking regular medication alters behaviour that makes a difference. For example, medication that can't be taken with alcohol presents a positive side-effect for heavy drinkers if taken diligently. Any regular activity has the same positive effects as observing a ritual.
Perhaps a larger proportion of ailments today are not the result of an illness? I'd find that easy to believe.
Re:Human race evolving? (Score:5, Interesting)
Went on Lexapro and I've been totally fine ever since.
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People seem to be able to better use their brains to keep their bodies healthy
Have you gone outside recently and seen the average American (as opposed to person). Healthy and 'brain using' are not attributes I'd apply to them.
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Have you gone outside recently and seen the average American (as opposed to person). Healthy and 'brain using' are not attributes I'd apply to them.
I want to mod you as both flamebait and insightful at the same time.
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Haven't heard about that last one but I'm pretty sure my neighbor's kid has ADD/OCD/MOUSE
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In fact, there is no evidence that the placebo response has any relationship to intelligence, or that stupid people are any more suggestible than smart people.
You can't set a broken leg with a placebo, but you might be able to make it hurt a little less.
Remember "kiss it and make it better?" Or the miraculous analgesic effect of a Band-Aid (especially one with pictures of cartoon characters)?
Some evidence suggests that part of the placebo response to pain is related to release of opiate like substan
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Here, you make two unfounded assumptions. First, you assume that you can look up all ingredients and determine for certain whether they work. In real life, however, very few substances have been adequately tested for clinical efficac
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Maybe he was dehydrated?
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No, that's how some American physician got the idea that the placebo effect was something you had to control for in a drug study. I realize the article makes it sound like the concept of placebos originated in WWII but it's simply not true.
Surgeons in Napoleonic times were well aware that their patients responded better if their medication tasted as badly as possible (and preferably produced other effects, like severe diarrhoea). Ships carried various substances specifically to make the surgeon's preparat
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There does seem to be some evidence to support the idea that human immune response is impacted in a significant way by attitude. If you make the patient happy and give them the expectation they are going to get well then instances of opportunistic infection seem to decrease somewhat and secondary aliments that would be expected to heal on their own seem to do so faster.
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I do not think that is correct. Smilodon went extinct only 10,000 years ago. I believe humans driving them to extinction is still one of the popular theories.
Re:Personal Anecdote (Score:5, Insightful)
You haven't read much of the old testament have you?
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You haven't read much of the old testament have you?
That wasn't a "side effect".
Re:Dangerous ? (Score:4, Funny)
They usually develop symptoms of depression and paranoia, but we've got a pill for that...