Placebo logic
According to a recent study, half of all doctors routinely prescribe placebos, and half don’t. The placebo effect is well-known. Placebos work, and they work well enough that trials for new drugs have to be designed with great care.
I am a consumer of medical services. Since placebos work, I’m better off with a doctor who will prescribe placebos than with a doctor who won’t. I can’t come right out and ask for a placebo, because then it’s not a placebo any more, it’s just a sugar pill.
Can I shop around for a doctor who prescribes placebos? But then I know that whatever he prescribes might be a placebo. Doesn’t this undermine the effect of real drugs as well as placebos?
How about if I find a doctor who is a really good liar? Someone I can trust to lie to me convincingly, with my best interests in mind.
It’s an interesting puzzle. I have to be well-informed to make sure I get the placebo, but the effectiveness of the placebo depends on a certain cluelessness.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
What if all medicines are actually placebos? And the only ones that actually work are the ones we believe in. And the more people who believe it, the better it works.
October 30th, 2008 at 5:41 am
if i’m prescribed a placebo, then am i charged the full price for the drug i think i’m getting?
at the price i’m paying for meds, they better NOT be sugar pills!!!!!
sounds like a class action suit in the making, to me!
October 30th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Yes, you have to pay full price, otherwise you know it’s a placebo, which undermines its effectiveness. In fact, there is some evidence that expensive placebos are more effective than cheap placebos.
As for all meds being placebos, in a Phase II randomized double-blind clinical trial, meds are compared against known placebos. If the med doesn’t work better than the placebo, it isn’t approved for use. So meds really do have physical effects on the body, in addition to the placebo effect.
November 1st, 2008 at 9:28 am
There was a prayer double blind a couple of years ago with heart patients that seemed to show that prayer may be better than placebos and many meds. What I still have difficulty understanding is how what I define as myself lives inside this complex mechanical, bio-chemical, electrical body and coordinates all of that below my level of consciousness. There was a show on savants that indicates they don’t filter information which is info overload in many areas but also creates access to a “different level of reality”
November 1st, 2008 at 11:17 am
My recollection is that the studies did not show “better than placebos” but I will do some googling.
November 2nd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
You are indeed a good googler! Of course it didn’t occur to me that not knowing they were being prayed for would render it a non-placebo effect.
As far as long term and wide-spread prayer - - healing may depend more on who is doing the praying. Pure of heart and all. There are a couple of people I hope never pray for me.
If people know they are being prayed for might that also create a placebo effect?
If you say you will pray for a person and then don’t, will that be as effective as saying you will pray for them and then you do?
And then if a person asks to be prayed for is that in itself enough to create the effect.
Then there are the fire walkers and the monk from Hawaii who prayed over a dying baby and she recovered. These two eye-witness events don’t fit into my ordinary reality and have continued to rattle around in my cognizance as dissonance.