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Thread: By the power of placebo!
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2018-03-22, 07:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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By the power of placebo!
Seen in Psychology today
Originally Posted by Psychology today
...
Maybe we should start painting our vehicles red, to see if it makes them go faster?
And maybe that's why Americans have so many more anti-science groups than Europe does. Hey, we bend reality to our will. We don't need no steekin' science.
Tongue-in-cheek,
Brian P.Last edited by pendell; 2018-03-22 at 07:37 AM.
"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2018-03-22, 08:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Obviously, Americans are just more gullible.
More seriously, the placebo effect is first and foremost a psychological phenomenon, even if it may have a physiological effect.
It doesn't seem that far-fetched to me that a person's individual psyche, mindset, or whatever you want to call it would change how strong their placebo effect is, and when they get it. If that's the case, then cultural differences may very well make a population more or less susceptible to the placebo effect.
Edit: Upon reading the full quoted text, it strikes me that there may be another, simpler answer. Perhaps not for the American/European question, but it seems to me that we're constantly producing more effective medicines. If that's the case, then people will naturally have more faith in them; if people hear about a medicine that's, say, 35% effective, I expect they'll have a weaker placebo effect than people who hear about one that's 80% effective.
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2018-03-22, 08:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Somewhat relevant: XKCD: Placebo Blocker
Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
My Spelljammer stuff (including an orbit tracker), 2E AD&D spreadsheet, and Vault of the Drow maps are available in my Dropbox. Feel free to use or not use it as you see fit!
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2018-03-22, 09:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
The placebo effect is real.
The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.
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2018-03-22, 09:47 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
My Spelljammer stuff (including an orbit tracker), 2E AD&D spreadsheet, and Vault of the Drow maps are available in my Dropbox. Feel free to use or not use it as you see fit!
Thri-Kreen Ranger/Psionicist by me, based off of Rich's A Monster for Every Season
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2018-03-22, 09:49 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Yes? No-one is denying this.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me. People are far more medicated than 20 years ago, especially in the US. Did you know that two sugar pill placebos are more effective than a single sugar pill placebo? And that a placebo injection has a higher placebo effect than the pills? Quantity & method matters, for whatever reason (and let me be clear: I have no idea why placebo works). Heck, I suspect that, if we were to test it, more expensive placebo would work better than cheap one (I'd test it by having the trial participants see the "cost", but be told that the trial is covering it - half would see "$10 a pill" vs the other half would see "$100 a pill").
Therefore, if we are in general taking more pills (and if my hypothesis is correct, in the US they are paying more for them), even if they are unrelated to the issue, placebo strength would have to be going up. Honestly, I don't see a downside* to this. Do we know if depression is currently being treated with placebos outside of clinical trials? I would hope it is - say, mid-level cases of depression, bad enough to need help but not so bad you want to break open the serious medicine?
Grey Wolf
*OK, I see a downside to giving pill makers a reason to jack up prices.Last edited by Grey_Wolf_c; 2018-03-22 at 09:51 AM.
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2018-03-22, 10:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Agreed. SO is the Nocebo effect, in which people can make themselves sick.
*OK, I see a downside to giving pill makers a reason to jack up prices.
For instance, if I put out SugarPill with a list price of $10 , and put out a second pill, identical in every respect, with a list price of $1000, I have to wonder whether placebo effect would be greater for the second group, the first group, or neither.
:Goes off to write a grant proposal:
Respectfully,
Brian P."Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2018-03-22, 10:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
In the article you quote, it states that the two classes of medicines assessed, anti-depressants and pain medication, have a statistically non-significant effect when compared to placebo. Both of these types of medicines have a major psychological component - the pain scale is entirely subjective for example and how do you objectively measure how happy a person is?
I would pretty much guaranteed that other types of medicines (antibiotics, COPD and asthma treatments, anti-cancer, etc) would have a statistically significant effect compared to placebo (a sugar pill won't cure your UTI; inhaling sugar won't stop your breathing problems; and a saline injection won't kill your tumour).
Combined with that the large majority of current drug development is in 'quality of life' medication, which include pain medication and anti-depressants, it's no surprise that placebos are apparently becoming more effective.Last edited by Brother Oni; 2018-03-22 at 10:47 AM.
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2018-03-22, 10:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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2018-03-22, 10:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
My Spelljammer stuff (including an orbit tracker), 2E AD&D spreadsheet, and Vault of the Drow maps are available in my Dropbox. Feel free to use or not use it as you see fit!
Thri-Kreen Ranger/Psionicist by me, based off of Rich's A Monster for Every Season
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2018-03-22, 11:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
I've also heard about a study where professional tasters preferred a cheap wine to itself when misinformed about it, so they're probably just faking it.
(Adam Connover is far more amusing than me and provides sources: go check him out)
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2018-03-22, 11:28 AM (ISO 8601)
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2018-03-22, 11:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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Ceterum autem censeo Hilgya malefica est
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2018-03-22, 12:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Turns out sugar has mystical properties in pill form and the placebo effect doesn't exist.
@fish like how white salmon is exactly the same as pink salmon in taste and health, but has been unpopular for a couple centuries? Both wild and domestic white salmon get pink dye thrown on to make it palatable despite the dye being expensive and unhealthy.Last edited by Tvtyrant; 2018-03-22 at 12:48 PM.
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2018-03-22, 12:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Oddly enough no it doesn't.
For example, one of the early placebo trials found that distilled water was a better post-operation painkiller than morphine - because of the placebo effect. However, as I understand it, the distilled water either elimiated all of the pain or none; the morphine usually eliminated some pain if not all.
OK, in the example does not have the treatement as statisitically non-significant (for one thing the water did better), but one should be able to see how a drug can fail against a placebo but still have an effect - it's just an effect on fewer people than can achieve it by state of mind.
This is where targetted medicine starts getting complex - a drug that will cure 10% of the population may well fail general testing when compared to a placebo, but if we can work out which 10% it works on then as a targetted drug it suddenly becomes far better than a placebo.
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2018-03-22, 01:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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Ceterum autem censeo Hilgya malefica est
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2018-03-22, 04:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Actually no, it means that the drug has no real improvement over placebo, so it's hard to justify the cost and expense of further drug development and clinical trials when a far cheaper sugar pill does just as well as your product.
A statistically significant effect compared to placebo is usually one of the goals of a successful clinical trial - if your product doesn't meet that, then it's either back to the drawing board or the whole programme gets canned.
Note that it's not just patients you have to convince - you have to convince the regulatory authorities (FDA in the US, MHRA in the UK, etc) to grant a license to both manufacture and sell your product. They're unlikely to let you sell something that's not statistically better than placebo.
Again, no. Placebo typically are just the bulking agent with flavourings and colouring (known as excipients) as appropriate, so basically the final product just with no active ingredient. There should be no side effects from the placebo as a result of the excipients, although there may be some due to the dosing method (eg differentiating between the discomfort from a suppository itself, the excipients or the drug and excipients).Last edited by Brother Oni; 2018-03-22 at 06:45 PM.
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2018-03-23, 05:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
As someone that regularly catches his own salmon. No. It doesn't. Really.
EDIT: OK, you do say 'white salmon' though there is not really a 'white salmon', there are white-ish fleshed salmon such as keta salmon (dog or chum salmon) -- you can dye that as pink as you want and it's quality is still vastly inferior to wild caught chinook/king or coho/silver. OK, getting off on a tangent here, but I get what you are saying. /EDIT
But yes, I get what you are saying (in regards to mass produced meats)...the power of presentation and marketing is quite strong, thus the use of dyes in meat products, brine injection into poultry, use of sodium nitrates in short cure meats, etc... "A feast for the eyes, if not the stomach"Last edited by Maelstrom; 2018-03-23 at 05:36 AM.
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2018-03-23, 10:44 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
From personal experience, generics is a really tough market, both in terms of achieving an equivalent product and in terms of the competition from rival companies.
A couple things here - in a double blind study, nobody knows who is getting what. The only time that people would know (the study is unblinded) is at the end of the study, or if a volunteer or patient becomes critically ill and a doctor agrees that they should be unblinded.
While it depends on the disease in question, I know you cannot use placebo in a study with cancer patients - such a study would never pass the ethics committee or gain FDA approval and thus fail to get off the ground in the first place. Typically for cancer, they normally compare the new product against the current best (gold standard) treatment, which makes proving a statistically significant improvement harder.
Or they blow the whistle to the FDA who can (and have) force a product recall and authority to revoke a companies' marketing license. Even if you believe the FDA are compromised, there are the equivalent government agencies in other countries.
Trust me, there's plenty of ways that results can be fudged, which is why many FDA auditors are trained by the FBI in fraud detection. It's often easier to justify why those particular dodgy results are acceptable (either by comparison to other data, running additional experiments, or finding a reason to invalidate the original results and replace them with new data), than it is to falsify data.
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2018-03-23, 11:24 AM (ISO 8601)
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2018-03-23, 11:29 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Oops. I forgot politics is banned here, even if scientific advancement affects politics. Posts scrapped.
Matthew Greet
My purpose in life is to play games.
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2018-03-23, 12:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Yes, an expensive placebo is more effective than a cheaper placebo:
http://www.latimes.com/science/scien...127-story.html
Note: Small sample size, so I'm unsure if it's been replicated.
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2018-03-23, 03:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Perhaps as scientific knowledge has advanced, we just make better placebos now.
Warning: This posting may contain wit, wisdom, pathos, irony, satire, sarcasm and puns. And traces of nut.
"The main skill of a good ruler seems to be not preventing the conflagrations but rather keeping them contained enough they rate more as campfires." Rogar Demonblud
"Hold on just a d*** second. UK has spam callers that try to get you to buy conservatories?!? Even y'alls spammers are higher class than ours!" Peelee
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2018-03-23, 03:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
How is that possible? A placebo is just a pill without any active ingredients; we've had the technology to make that for more than fifty years and I don't think there has been any great advances. Like the rifle, placebos are mature technology; I don't see how you could make a sugar pill better.
Respectfully,
Brian P."Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."
-Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
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2018-03-23, 03:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
On the other hand, as medicine gets better, the placebo gets better automatically because we understand that medicine is becoming more effective and therefore we assume we'll get a stronger effect when we take a placebo without knowing it's a placebo. Presumably, even though placebos are effective when we know they're placebos, they wouldn't get stronger as medicine improved if we knew they were placebos.
(Disclaimer: the entire paragraph above is speculation by a specialist in an unrelated field about an effect we don't really understand; handle with care.)Last edited by Jormengand; 2018-03-23 at 03:33 PM.
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2018-03-23, 03:47 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Warhammer 40,000 Campaign Skirmish Game: Warpstrike
My Spelljammer stuff (including an orbit tracker), 2E AD&D spreadsheet, and Vault of the Drow maps are available in my Dropbox. Feel free to use or not use it as you see fit!
Thri-Kreen Ranger/Psionicist by me, based off of Rich's A Monster for Every Season
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2018-03-23, 04:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Warning: This posting may contain wit, wisdom, pathos, irony, satire, sarcasm and puns. And traces of nut.
"The main skill of a good ruler seems to be not preventing the conflagrations but rather keeping them contained enough they rate more as campfires." Rogar Demonblud
"Hold on just a d*** second. UK has spam callers that try to get you to buy conservatories?!? Even y'alls spammers are higher class than ours!" Peelee
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2018-03-23, 04:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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2018-03-23, 05:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: By the power of placebo!
Warning: This posting may contain wit, wisdom, pathos, irony, satire, sarcasm and puns. And traces of nut.
"The main skill of a good ruler seems to be not preventing the conflagrations but rather keeping them contained enough they rate more as campfires." Rogar Demonblud
"Hold on just a d*** second. UK has spam callers that try to get you to buy conservatories?!? Even y'alls spammers are higher class than ours!" Peelee