The debate about the existence of a placebo effect has heated up over the past year as more and more lab experiments are detecting immediate physiological responses to placebos. A new study takes placebo investigations out of the lab and into a clinical trial, showing a discernible placebo effect over time…
While researchers usually use placebos in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of a new treatment, this trial pitted one placebo against another. “It’s upside down research,” said Ted Kaptchuk…”We investigated whether a sham acupuncture device has a greater placebo effect than an inert pill.”
In the second phase of the study, patients receiving sham acupuncture reported a more significant decrease in pain and symptom severity than those receiving placebo pills for the duration of the trials. The results of this study show that the placebo effect varies by type of placebo used.
“These findings suggest that the medical ritual of a device can deliver an enhanced placebo effect beyond that of a placebo pill. There are many conditions in which ritual is irrelevant when compared with drugs, such as in treatment of a bacterial infection,” said Kaptchuk, “but the other extreme may also be true. In some cases, the ritual may be the critical component.”
As ever, believing in the ritual is what counts.
This is interesting but isn’t really that amazing.
Acupuncture has been hyped a lot recently and pills are being constantly badmouthed by the alternative treatements crowd.
So it’s possible that people are more believing of acupunture than pills.
(I think they’re nuts but I know _lots_ of people who put more faith in the alternative treatments than convetional medicine.)
This proves why “fetching” warts, the way Huck Finn explains to Tom Sawyer, is so good – it requires the afflicted to do something that they must be convinced will work. So it does!
“Why, you take your cat and go and get in the grave- yard ‘long about midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it’s midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can’t see ’em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear ’em talk; and when they’re taking that feller away, you heave your cat after ’em and say, ‘Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I’m done with ye!’ That’ll fetch ANY wart.”
There’s less controversy here than you may think. The big study “debunking” placebos ADDED together results from many studies, including big studies of some medical problem that apparently is NOT helped by placebos. Adding numbers together from separate studies is not good math.
There’s plenty for placebos to do, and I plan to ask my doctor for them the first time he says “There’s no medicine that can help you.”
– Precision Blogger