I don’t really understand this. If a thousand people are given an experimental drug, and out of those thousand people, any number of them (greater than zero, of course) are cured, why should it matter how they are cured? I realize that there’s the possiblity that the people who’ve been cured are suffering from a psycho-somatic illness, but why should the placebo effect matter if it cures people? (I realize that in certain cases it doesn’t, and only makes people feel better, but there are instances where people have been cured by the placebo effect.)
I don’t quite grasp it. I realize that the goal is a 100% cure rate, but in some cases, even a 20% cure rate is better than nothing.
Because I don’t want to go to the drugstore and buy some medicine, thinking it will cure me, but then find out that it was just the placebo effect that cured the test subjects. You want to eliminate pyschosomatic effects in order to determine if the medication is REALLY having a physical effect or not.
If the placebo effect is greater than 50% during a test, then there is something wrong with the drug being tested for it is not doing the job. The P effect should always be dramatically smaller than the causative effect of the test subject drug because a placebo is nothing. Really nothing. It is a sugar pill or liquid given in place of a drug to determine the effects of a drug on a control group. It is the X factor. It can be the control. It should have a minimal effect.
If it has an equal effect to the drug, then the drug is no good and having no effect on the illness it was designed to treat.
Have there been any documented cases of a sugar pill actually doing something?
OK, now for my response: In any scientific test, you have to have some way of seperating signal (the results of the change you made) from the noise (random stuff). That’s why you have controlled experiments: Two equal groups, everything equal (or controlled for) except the one thing you are testing. That way you know that the one thing you are testing is having the effect, and not the placebo effect or the phase of the moon or the fluctuation of the solar flares. Admittedly, a completely controlled experiement is a fantasy, but that’s where the second Golden Rule of Research comes in: Repeatability. The journals exist for a reason: So other medical testers, in other worlds, can repeat the experiment and everyone can compare notes to weed out the really oddball stuff (not always frauds, just subpar practice or genuine randomness). Peer-review is as essential as controlled experiments.
Because some medications cost $15 or more per pill, while you can get sugar tablets for ten a penny. There is little point going to the trouble of collecting raw materials in quantity, then refining and concentrating them to exact specifications and at great expense if the end result is a chemical with no greater effect than a shot of sucrose. That’s not even including the cost of testing, marketing and delivering the drug.
Fact is, if I ever end up undergoing chemotherapy, as my mother has, I will definitely want to be taking medications which have been shown to be physically effective.
The problem is that the placebo effect is erratic and undependable in operation. One person might be helped and another not. Or a person might be helped on one occasion and not on another. Or the placebo effect might be a result of somebody like a pretty female or handsome male nurse giving attention to the patient and have nothing to do with the medicine.
The whole point is that the placebo effect is an uncontrolled variable about which little is known. Scientific tests are of no value if there is an uncrontrolled variable in the setup.
And to my post I should have added repeatability as Deleth pointed out. Confirming experiments that use entirely different methods of testing are valuable because it is highly unlikely that different experimental setups will all have the same unknown and uncontrolled variables. If they all get the same results you can be a lot surer of the validity of the conclusion than with just a single experiment.
One point no one has mentioned is that virtually all drugs have side effects, sometimes quite serious in some people and you don’t want to be giving a powerful medication if a placebo will work as well.
I recently read that the placebo effect is now in question and you have to compare that with people who do nothing. After all, many common illnesses get better just with the passage of time. Maybe that is why they still practice medicine.
The big problem with the placebo effect is that one can’t bottle it. there are many drugs whos effects are often little or no better than placebos. However, one cannot ethically make a sugar pill to give to people, even though 40% of then will actually improve. Instead, you give them much more expensive but often useless drugs. The antidepressants are a case in point - for mild depression they are no better than a placebo.
The placebo effect can, and is, dealt with by using what is known as the double-blind, placebo-controlled study.
Double-blind means that both the test subject and the person giving the drug to the test subject are both “blind” - they don’t know whether they are getting the active drug or the placebo. This prevents the administering person from coloring the mind of the test subject somehow by knowing what they’re getting.
Placebo-controlled means there are two equal groups of test subjects - one group gets the experimental drug, one gets the placebo.
It’s actually quite fascinating to be “in on” this kind of thing. The hospital I’m doing relief work in is involved in a drug trial, and the doc doing the trial gets a new patient into the trial every so often. He calls down to us and tells us the name of the patient to be put in the study. We call an 800 number to the drug company, which “randomizes” them - places them into either the experimental (real drug) or placebo group. We get the info, log it in three or four different ways, go get the drug or placebo, and send it up. We’re “in the know”, of course, as the pharmacy, but we don’t ever see the patients. The doc, nursing staff, and anyone else that reads the chart has no idea which one they’re getting because that info is only logged in the pharmacy.
The pharmacists that work there all the time have a vastly different attitude, though. They see it as a giant paperwork blizzard that adds to their workload. Which is why they love to push it off on me, who is “fascinated” by the process and being “in on it”.
Part 1. Yes, in many drug tests the group given the placebo contains some patients who report a reduction in symptoms, as well as some side effects. You wouldn’t expect a phony drug to do anything, but the effects are there.
Part 2. Here’s a whole different way of looking at the placebo effect. Most placebos are not sugar, but clay, the same “inert ingredient” that binds most drugs together. That’s right, unused kitty litter. Now, if you paw through research on primitive, or traditional medicine, you’ll find that many remedies contain clay mud. If you check out research on pica (patients eating dirt) you’ll find that the patients often had mineral deficits or some other illness. Some drug test researchers are dancing around the edges of the idea that clay itself has some medical value.
Remember that ancient saying about, “I feel so low, I’m gonna go out back and eat dirt?” Maybe there’s something to that.
I have only a frail cite for Part 2. I heard it on a story on NPR.
