{"id":1450,"date":"2010-12-24T14:46:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-24T04:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=1450"},"modified":"2010-12-23T21:11:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-23T11:11:34","slug":"win-and-placebo-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2010\/12\/24\/win-and-placebo-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Win and Placebo II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost three years ago, I pondered whether you could harness the placebo effect<\/a> in a pill, and how you would test that.<\/p>\n

Then, in the comments, I wondered if you could get people to knowingly take a placebo in a trial<\/a>. In a later comment, I found an exploratory study that suggested it might be possible – at least among neurotics.<\/p>\n

Now I have discovered a report<\/a> of a new “proof-of-principle” study<\/a> suggesting that openly and honestly providing placebos may still have a placebo effect.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer: I haven’t read the source article, but have perused the abstract.<\/p>\n

There are small surprises here: yes, you can get people to take sugar pills even if they know they are sugar pills; placebos might<\/em> still work even if you know they are placebos; and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine sponsored a trial that wasn’t widely attacked for poor design!<\/p>\n

But there was an mild poke from the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog<\/a>, pointing out that the trial wasn’t double-blinded because the patients<\/em> knew they were receiving the placebo (as opposed to no treatment) – the scientists, quite rightly, did not.<\/p>\n

It is not often you will see me defend a medical study against the need for double-blindness, but this comes back to a very similar issue to my original point in my original post. When you are testing the effectiveness of an openly-revealed placebo, then double-blindness is surely meaningless. I think having a single-blind test (for the researcher) is the most appropriate design possible in this case.<\/p>\n

The other mild criticisms, acknowledged it seems, by the author, seemed more fair, and I think we all agree it needs more substantial study before a conclusion can be drawn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Further study into placebos leads to some surprising findings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1450"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1453,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1450\/revisions\/1453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}