Side effects of placebos
Discussion
Pints said:
Either way, I'd rather the body / mind was doing the work if it's effective than the foreign substance of a medical drug.
Yes, a good friend of mine was a lifelong believer in faith healing. He refused to take the high blood pressure tablets his doctor gave him, and died from a heart attack in the middle of a faith healing session.And to Dift. How do you triple the strength of nothing? Or do you mean you say to the patient 'This is triple strength you know!' whilst administering saline.
Simpo Two said:
Pints said:
Either way, I'd rather the body / mind was doing the work if it's effective than the foreign substance of a medical drug.
Yes, a good friend of mine was a lifelong believer in faith healing. He refused to take the high blood pressure tablets his doctor gave him, and died from a heart attack in the middle of a faith healing session.And to Dift. How do you triple the strength of nothing? Or do you mean you say to the patient 'This is triple strength you know!' whilst administering saline.
off the end of my post 
Derek Smith said:
There was another test which showed that homeopathy, which I thought was 100% placebo as their solutions have no active ingredients, showed a lower rate .
That is entirely possible. You have to remember that tests of statistical significance are based on probability. If there were no difference in efficacy between homeopathic remedy and placebo (as one would expect in a double blind trial), using the standard 95% confidence level, you would still expect one study in 20 to report a statistically significant difference.Placebo effects note the multiple can range from regression to the mean, you take the pill because the symptoms are at their worst, they get better naturally - you assume the pill did it. You feel better as the illness runs its course, the nice medic administering or prescribing the treatment helps you feel things are happening and so you are better able to cope, etc.
Placebos seem to work particularly well as painkillers, apparently by convincing the patient's body to start releasing its own natural painkillers. This still works even when the patient knows it's a placebo.
As an example, patients taking saline solution instead of morphine as a painkiller do communicate pain relief. However, naloxone blocks the effect of morphine. If you add naloxone to the drip, without telling the patient, the pain returns.
That suggests that they were receiving genuine pain relief and it's not just in their heads, and that the naloxone is stopping their bodies from doing whatever it's doing to reduce the pain.
It all appears weird and magic, and it's almost certainly all down to a lack of understanding of the complexities of the body at work.
There are also still papers questioning the effectiveness of placebos at all, which could suggest that in some cases placebos can activate the body's natural defences or functions, in other cases there is no natural function to activate. Interesting subject whatever way it works.
Everything's always more complicated than it looks. You think you're starting to understand something but in reality you've only progressed to the next level of questions.
As an example, patients taking saline solution instead of morphine as a painkiller do communicate pain relief. However, naloxone blocks the effect of morphine. If you add naloxone to the drip, without telling the patient, the pain returns.
That suggests that they were receiving genuine pain relief and it's not just in their heads, and that the naloxone is stopping their bodies from doing whatever it's doing to reduce the pain.
It all appears weird and magic, and it's almost certainly all down to a lack of understanding of the complexities of the body at work.
There are also still papers questioning the effectiveness of placebos at all, which could suggest that in some cases placebos can activate the body's natural defences or functions, in other cases there is no natural function to activate. Interesting subject whatever way it works.
Everything's always more complicated than it looks. You think you're starting to understand something but in reality you've only progressed to the next level of questions.
Alfanatic said:
Everything's always more complicated than it looks. You think you're starting to understand something but in reality you've only progressed to the next level of questions.
I'm not convinced. I tend to hold the view that once you've picked your way through the maze of questions and dead-ends, the genuine answers are often very simple; witness the discovery of the structure of DNA.
Alfanatic said:
Placebos seem to work particularly well as painkillers, apparently by convincing the patient's body to start releasing its own natural painkillers. This still works even when the patient knows it's a placebo.
When there have been tests on subjects claiming pain relief via placebos no endorphins have been found. So natural painkillers would appear to be unsupported. Simpo Two said:
I'm not convinced. I tend to hold the view that once you've picked your way through the maze of questions and dead-ends, the genuine answers are often very simple; witness the discovery of the structure of DNA.
DNA is neither simple nor the complete answer.Derek Smith said:
Alfanatic said:
Placebos seem to work particularly well as painkillers, apparently by convincing the patient's body to start releasing its own natural painkillers. This still works even when the patient knows it's a placebo.
When there have been tests on subjects claiming pain relief via placebos no endorphins have been found. So natural painkillers would appear to be unsupported. Derek Smith said:
DNA is neither simple nor the complete answer.
I said 'the structure of' - ie when Crick, Watson and others were looking at conflicting information and then had the eureka moment... (with a bit of help from some borrowed X-rays) - and the answer is 'double helix'. Obviously the biochemistry is another matter.Yes, a tiny piece of the puzzle slots into place and becomes clear, but my point is that so many of these eureka moments also pull back the blinds and you suddenly realise that the thousand piece puzzle that you thought was 90% finished now looks like a ten thousand piece puzzle and you're less than a tenth of the way there. Then you get another moment of clarity and the puzzle grows yet again. You get meaningful and usable information all the same though.
It's not always that way I guess, but that's how it seems to me. I still think we're at the tip of the iceberg in so many areas, but then I'm a layman so perhaps it looks different through professional eyes.
Whatever, it does remind me of Dr Adrian Thompson's experiments on hardware evolution, explained succinctly here.
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-ci...
The most interesting points are that circuits that to the observer appear to do nothing and aren't connected to anything are playing a crucial part in the circuit, and transferring the circuit to another array that on the surface should be identical also doesn't work.
So his experiment was a success, he managed to evolve a circuit that could reliably give the behaviour he wanted, but when he looked at the circuit to understand how it had solved the problem, all of a sudden he had a whole string of new questions on his hands.
It's not always that way I guess, but that's how it seems to me. I still think we're at the tip of the iceberg in so many areas, but then I'm a layman so perhaps it looks different through professional eyes.
Whatever, it does remind me of Dr Adrian Thompson's experiments on hardware evolution, explained succinctly here.
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-ci...
The most interesting points are that circuits that to the observer appear to do nothing and aren't connected to anything are playing a crucial part in the circuit, and transferring the circuit to another array that on the surface should be identical also doesn't work.
So his experiment was a success, he managed to evolve a circuit that could reliably give the behaviour he wanted, but when he looked at the circuit to understand how it had solved the problem, all of a sudden he had a whole string of new questions on his hands.
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