Here’s a thought-
many modern drugs have uncomfortable side effects, while placebos have none.
In at least one test on anti-depressants recently, the drug was less sucessful than the placebo
mainly because the placebo had no side effects.
(sorry, no cite ATM- just trust me, sorry)
So, the placebo group were eventually informed that they had recieved no real active treatment-
Back to the OP
*“I think they’re wasting money, time and energy by going to a homeopath, and although they’re keeping in touch with their real doctor and not throwing away other medication, I still feel scared” *
I’m going to give the Ann Landers advice.
It’s their money. It’s their time. It’s their energy. They’re seeing a doctor. Keep your nose out of their business.
The issue isn’t homeopathy, it’s that you’re scared. What’s that about? Are you afraid of death, or suffering, or losing your dearest friend? Or are you the type of person that just wants everybody to live their personal lives according to your idea of what’s right? You’ll get more meaningful answers if you talk about you, instead of all this other baloney.
[ Ann Landers hat off ]
Henry, dialysis is not a cure. It’s an unpleasant process to undergo. If the homeopathics mean he avoids dialysis while he takes them, that’s a good outcome even if they only have a placebo effect.
As long as he is being monitored closely so that he gets effective allopathic treatment when it becomes essential, where’s the problem? Are any of his conditions curable? Are they more curable now than they would be in 6 months time? If someone has a brain tumour which is removable and curable with surgery now, it’s probably not such a fab idea to treat the tumour with unproven science.
Homeopathy does have a negative side effect: because people believe in them, they see it as an alternative to conventional drugs even when there are effective and safe ones available. And some people think (consciously or not) that it can compensate for a less healthy lifestyle. My mother tends to buy “supplements” which is probably harmless, but when she buys supplement that claim to protect the liver and use that as an excuse to drink more, than I have no choice but to try to destroy that placebo effect.
There is an even greater damage that is done by alternative medicine: they often suggest that conventional treatments are ineffective. The result is that patients stop believing in modern medicine and don’t get the benefit from placebo effect when they receive conventional drugs. That’s the main reason I’m opposed to alternative medicine in general.
The human mind is a perpetual enigma. An enigma wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in an enigma. We may never know what goes on in it.
I think it would be wise for us not to discredit the power of the mind over the body. We are only now discovering the powers of the mind that are observable, muchless the power of human spirit. I think that there is a lot of truth to the saying, “Mind over matter.”
Homeopathics, are like Miss Cleo. They are such a blatant liers, that it would be well advised to stay away from them. However, the placebo effect is a curious effect, and i wouldn’t bother trying to tell your friend to stop going to the homeopath. As long as he evades dialysis, nothing can be really bad for him. How he wants to spend his money is his decisison really…
That’s the definition of faith, isn’t it? I don’t have faith that if I push a plate off a table, it will fall to the floor, I know that’s going to happen. If there’s something you don’t know but believe it anyway, that’s faith.
Which brings up another interesting point: Many religious people are so devouted to their religion that they have absolutely zero room for any doubt. Can it actually be considered “faith” then? Or is having “faith” believing God exists, but never knowing he does?
—In at least one test on anti-depressants recently, the drug was less sucessful than the placebo mainly because the placebo had no side effects.—
Though I also have no hard cite, I can confirm that a read this same thing here:
The water I drink has picked up infinitesimal influences of the good things that have passed through its essence in the past ages of the Earth.
Which is why I have all the bad shit happen to me…
Maybe always good advice 
I don’t really understand what you mean by this - I don’t have some vague fear about the meaning of the universe, and I’m not doing this out of some desire to control everyone around me. I have a specific fear that someone with limited money and energy is using that money and energy on something that isn’t really helping him, and, indeed, may have been better spent on things that are actually pleasurable or enjoyable in their own right.
I’m also scared of how supporters of homeopathy spread postive results and ignore negative ones. I’ve had a very close family member say that their homeopath or naturopath couldn’t help them when what they had was serious, but they still plan on going, and want me to go too (just for the heck of it).
Huh? I could talk about myself all day, but I don’t think that’s going to be too interesting or helpful.
As so often happens in this world, I found out I had a false dilemma. I ended up telling them what I think of the treatment, and they ignored it, so there ya go. The reason I did it was because they were pushing me to go to cure my own ills, and when I said I’m not interested, they pushed me into saying why I’m not. So I did - I told them that the treatment is plain water, with a bit of pixie dust in it. They weren’t too impressed with me and they’re not going to change their behaviour.
C’est La Vie.
I’m glad you cleared the air with your friends. At least you got closer to the truth of what’s going on.
Hey, wait a minute! You said “I told them that the treatment is plain water, with a bit of pixie dust in it.” They’ve got pixie dust? REAL pixie dust? We were talking about placebos, when all that time you knew someone who has dust from pixies? For goodness’ sake man, THAT is news. You’re sitting on a goldmine! Maybe a Nobel Prize!
The above link is to a Washington Post story covering an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2001.
I don’t know if anyone is still reading the thread, but I did read the article and thought I’d post some thoughts about it.
First of all, there were about a dozen letters to the editors published in response to the article… that’s a lot. Many of the letters pointed out methodological issues, most of which I won’t summarize here. There was at least one important issue not commented on, as far as I noticed in a somewhat hurried read-through.
There are also loads of articles that reference the piece, which is a lot for only 2 years or so.
To summarize, the article is a meta-analysis-- that means it summarizes the results of many studies in an attempt to synthesize all knowledge on a topic. In this case, the authors summarized across all studies they could find which had a placebo arm and a ‘no-treatment’ arm (and met other reasonable criteria). About 10,000 people from 114 studies published between 1948 (approx) and 1998 were included. One advantage of meta-analysis is that it allows the pooling of information and subjects across many small and large studies. A disadvantage is that to the extent that the studies are measuring different things, collapsing them together doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I think that is the major problem here. The researchers summarize over trials of smoking cessation, hypertension, (extremes of differentness, possibly) and 38 other medical conditions. The unspoken hypothesis of the study, therefore, is that placebos have the same effect regardless of the medical objective being considered. I don’t think this makes sense, and several letters commented on it. The point not specifically addressed in the letters is that the medical treatments in the included studies may also not have worked. I doubt that a proponent of placebos would argue that they should generally work even when nothing else works, but that they may sometimes work almost as well as real treatment. Other issues pointed out by the letters include the fact that many of the no-treatment arms had plenty of patient-doctor contact, and that this may be the mechanism of placebo, so that the comparison is tainted.
In addition to the methodological isues skimmed over above, the authors, IMO, biased they way their results were perceived by making dichotomous endpoints the primary discussing point of the paper. (Dichotomous in this case means yes/no.) They thus focussed their attention on whether the smoking cessation was successful in more placebo or untreated patients, rather than the number of cigarettes smoked, which is the continuous version of that outcome. (If you’re new to this stuff, continuous means measured, loosely, or counted. Another example could be hypertension. Dichotomous: do you have high blood pressure? Continuous: What is your systolic blood pressure? The smoking and hypertension example also show that you can change people for the better (lower BP, fewer cigarettes) without making that dichotomous measure switch.)
I can’t see why they did this except that it supported their preconceived notion that the placebo effect doesn’t exist. (Or, even more cynically, that they would get more attention for shooting it down than supporting it.) For example, more people were involved in studies they were unable to generate continuous results for than for the studies with continuous outcomes. Each of the continuous results (except one) showed a clear advantage for the placebo, while the dichotomous did not, generally. So their results actually show that the placebo works!
As a final point, the authors in many places discuss the fact that the power of some tests that failed to show what they wanted was small. (Statistical power is, loosely, the probability you reject the null hypothesis, given a particular alternative is true.) However, they fail to address the fact that the ‘main’ result about the dichotomous outcomes were in fact close to being statistically significant, suggesting that the power for their main outcome was lacking, and that more subjects could in fact prove that the placebo effect exists, even in the dichotomous case!
The Washington Post actually did a decent job: they reported the results of the study as the NEJM allowed them to be published. On the other hand, the NEJM got totally hoodwinked, (or more cynically, got desired coverage even though the science was mediocre), and the peer-review process once again showed its frailty.
The placebo effect is alive and well, and the authors of the article go on the list of ‘scientists’ whose credibility is highly suspect.
Nogginhead, thank you very much for taking the time to provide such a cogent and thorough review of the paper in question. Clearly, again, news of the death of the placebo effect is premature. I am also disappointed that this paper would receive such a bright and apparently positive turn in the limelight, given its significant methodological deficiencies. Perhaps it is news that the audience for that journal wants to hear, regardless of its empirical support?
Yes, but was this a double-blind study? 
Yes, thank you nogginhead. Well done.