Many years ago I read an article in a popular psychology magazine about a study that had been done to look at the differences in talk therapy vs. drug therapy for a group of psychiatric patients. All of the patients were tested for levels of various neurochemicals believed to be involved in the disorder.
Some of the talk therapy patients got better and some did not. Some of the drug therapy patients got better and some did not.
However, when neurochemical levels were tested again, all of the patients who got better showed the same changes in levels, regardless of the type of therapy.
Isn’t this the placebo effect in action?
You could argue that talk therapy was the placebo, right? A pill with no active ingredients. Yet the positive results were quantifiable and consistent disorder profiles.
Surely there are many examples of placebo patients in different kinds of studies who got better and the mechanism of how is not understood.
So, is it true that placebo effects are sometimes real effects of an unknown mechanism? The dark energy of psychology?
Yes, I know the whole “the mind is powerful” drill, I’m just wondering if any real research has been done into this area.
No, it’s not the placebo effect. It’s just a drug not working.
To declare a placebo effect, you would first need to determine whether there was a difference between the placebo group and a non-blind control. IOW you give one group the drug, another group counselling (your “placebo”) and a third group gets told they will get no treatment and are sent home. You then measure the results for all three groups and see if there is any difference.
“Neurochemical levels” vary all the time for all sorts of reasons. The fact that you saw the same variance in the placebo group as the test group isn’t evidence of the placebo effect. The default hypothesis is that it’s natural variance.
The placebo effect only kicks in when people given a placebo see an improvement that a completely untreated group don’t see. When a placebo group sees the same response as the treatment group, that’s just evidence that your treatment doesn’t work.
To consider another example, I take two groups of babies, and each year administer one group with a drug and another with sugar pills. After 18 years I measure the heights of the two groups. If the two groups have the same average height and the same variance in height, that isn’t evidence of that the placebo effects height. It’s just evidence that the treatment doesn’t effect height. If both the placebo group and treatment group were on average 6 inches shorter than the general population, that would be a placebo effect. But if we don’t measure against an untreated population, we can never know that.
No, talk therapy is talk therapy as opposed to drug therapy. It’s trying something else that might work not telling them you’re trying something different just to see if they’ll get better due to either the passage of time or having a different mindset.
The only way you could argue that they got better (or saw results) by the placebo effect is if you first want to argue that talk therapy is fake, not real or has no effect, such as one might find when giving a sick person a sugar pill. Once you can prove talk therapy as useless, then you can move to calling it a placebo when putting it up against drug therapy.