Enhancing the Placebo

NY Times ^ | May 4, 2010 | OLIVIA JUDSON

[neverdem]

Op-Ed Columnist

The placebo effect is, potentially, one of the most powerful forces in medicine. The challenge is to harness that power in a reliable and systematic way.

First, what is the placebo effect?

It’s the improvement in health that some patients experience because of the feeling that they are receiving medical care. A classic example comes from drug trials. Suppose patients are randomly divided into three groups: those who get no treatment, those who get the drug that’s being tested, and those who get the placebo treatment — typically a pill that looks and tastes like the drug, but doesn’t contain it, or any other active ingredient.

The idea is that the “no treatment” group shows how many people would have gotten better by themselves; the “placebo” group shows any effect of participating in medical rituals (like taking pills); the “drug” group shows any effect of the drug over and above the effect of medical rituals. Simple.

Or not. Different studies of the placebo effect report wildly different results. One survey of 117 trials of two ulcer drugs found that, depending on the trial, patients in the placebo group had anywhere from zero to a 100 percent recovery rate.

The drugs also varied in their effectiveness from one trial to the next; sometimes patients on the placebo did better than those on the drug. Intriguingly, the results varied from country to country, with Brazilians showing no placebo effect and Germans having a strong one. Why? No one knows, but it doesn’t appear to be because of anything inherently German: trials of drugs for hypertension found a weaker placebo effect in Germany than in other countries...

[E. Pluribus Unum]

So this is how Obamacare is going to work.

"It's all in your head. Take this pill."

[Pollster1]

Mark for reference: Placebo discussion

[tired&retired]

I’ve been saying for years that instead of comparing our drugs to placebos, we should be working to make placebos work better!

It’s absolutely amazing how the power of suggestion and hypnosis can be used to heal the human body. It’s equally amazing how the emotional subconscious can cause illness that destroys the body!