Should you save money by using generic placebos ? No, for branding is powerful. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/brand-name-generic-drugs-placebo-effect/
Pharmaceutical company advertising actually makes drugs more effective!
Mike Ditka throwing a football through a hanging tire causes erections.
Purpose of experiment: Determine whether sex treatment is more or less efficacious than placebo treatment.
Experimental design: Place thread treating sex adjacent to thread treating placebo on eclectic web magazine.
Measurement of efficacy: Number of comments.
Conclusion: Sex treatment is more efficacious than placebo treatment.
So this basically implies that people are getting more gullible and trusting, right?
5 Well we've got Trump and Brexit too.
Or more confident in science.
Placebos work even without deception. I'm unaware of any papers comparing no deception placebos with deception placebos, but maybe there are some. Here's an example paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087054718770012
8: I don't understand. How can you have a placebo without deception? "Take this sugar pill every day. Try to imagine that it is a powerful drug that will give you erections, cure your depression, and unstuff your nose. Report back in 3 weeks."
That's not how you unstuff a nose.
Haha everyone moby's doesn't reach his nose!
9: yeah, that's basically it. You tell the person that the biomedical procedure is totally inert, but is an aid to help them harness the power of positive thinking. It suggests that an active ingredient is the medical ritual in addition to, or instead of, the belief.
At least I don't have absurdly wide nostrils or a funny glans.
I have an oenophile friend who occasionally treats me to something very, very expensive from his stash. My taste buds aren't terribly acute, and we all know that even the experts can be fooled, but I tell ya, my friend has given me some amazing wine. I honestly think I can tell the difference between his wines and my favorite bottles of $10 plonk.
(Have we done a thread devoted to cheap wine? My favorite red is the Barefoot pinot noir; the Hogue late harvest riesling is my favorite white.)
And for the philosophers here: If I find a wine particularly tasty merely because of its price, does that mean it doesn't actually taste better?
I don't understand. How can you have a placebo without deception?
For a clinical trial there's no deception involved (that would be unethical!) You're told "OK, take this pill every day - it's either going to be a sugar pill or it's going to be our new blood pressure medication. I don't know which it is and neither will you."
There's uncertainty, but no deception. But there could still be a placebo effect because the patient thinks well, this might be the medication.
Interesting one: how sensitive is the placebo effect in these circumstances to the probability of receiving the live medication? If you tell someone "this is almost definitely blood pressure medication" will the placebo effect be greater than if you said "one of you lot is getting the real medication and the other 99 are getting a sugar pill"?
Most people running clinical trials don't really want to pay to answer that question.
It looks like I wandered by again just in time for a really big pet peeve of mine.
People tend to use the placebo effect to mean the effects of suggestion on actual symptoms. This is a really bad idea, because then it doesn't mean that actual clinical trials with placebos are showing you the placebo effect.
The improvement that you see control groups is the result of, to the best of the researcher's abilities, everything but the drug.
This includes the effects of suggestion on actual symptoms. It also includes: the effect of suggestion on reporting of actual symptoms; the effect of anything else at all on reporting of actual symptoms*; the extent to which people or experimenters just get their symptoms wrong; the (hopefully small) number of participants who were misdiagnosed and have some other problem entirely; reversion to the mean and its bigger brother just-got-better-for-no-reason; and so on until every causal factor in the universe has been listed.
When people have studied the difference between getting a placebo drug/procedure and getting nothing at all it turns out the effect is not that impressive.
*The effect of a placebo tends to look a lot stronger when it comes to self reported symptoms like nausea or pain than it does for directly measurable ones like how much people are vomiting or smoking or how much they weigh. And self reports of symptoms are really obviously something that can be affected by all kinds of random crap like how sunny it is that day, or if the experimenter is really likeable, or if anxiety about having a medical condition you don't know how to treat is getting lower because you're in a clinical trial now, and so on.
Good! A magic-free world. It's so nice to have my biases confirmed.
The hardest part of clinical trials is collecting the vomit so you have an objective measure.
Naively, one would expect that to be the soft part.
I thought that was the p-hacking?
22: I hear that's done with tapes these days.