By Fad-
Nocebos fronting as placebos, cracking down on Zcience
A few months back I made some cheeky comment about placebos not actually being inert, in that no substance is entirely 100% inert. Well it turns out I was drawing from the zeitgeist of ideas. I came across this article on the "natural news" (link below), the implications of which were first unclear because of how they talk about it, and how I think, so I thought I would write it out so I could understand what this is all about... and add something that the writer failed to add in the article as he was too excited about the prospect of hammering big pharma. Which is fine, I would be too.
Say you want to test whether or not a drug will clear up cancer.
You make a control group and an experimental group.
In the control group you give participants (P's) a substance which is thought to be inert (usually a sugar pill), and in the experimental group you give them the actual drug you want to test.
Now the trick is that you dont tell the P's that the sugar pill is actually a sugar pill, because you want them to think that they are being given the real drug. Scientists do this because it has been found that if your doctor merely suggests (power of suggestion/ expectancy effect) that something will make you better, that it actually tends to (thus named the placebo effect). It has some kind of psychosomatic effect (mind over matter), maybe it alleviates stress which allows the condition to heal, or perhaps its something more elaborate with regards to belief who knows. The reasons why it works is unclear at this point in the research (at least officially).
So in order to see if a drug actually works, you need to test it against an inert substance. Check.
But here is the problem. As I cheekily uttered in post a month or so ago, there is no such thing as a true dissolvable placebo, as everything you ingest has SOME chemical component which will have SOME physical effect, ranging from minor to significant.
What this article is suggesting is that drug companies are using placebos (that actually cause whatever they are testing to be negatively effected, or nocebos) in order to counteract the participants expectancy effects and make their drug look better by contrast, which could potentially mean that the placebo effect was MORE influential then we are lead to believe it was in some of these experiments.
So say in that experiment above the control group was given this inert pill... but it wasn't actually inert (as discussed its impossible to make it 100%) but in this scenario the pill was actually designed to cause the participants symptoms/ disease to intensify(physical), which is at odds with their belief (psychological) that it will work, and the corresponding placebo effect.
So say the results were such that:
Control group: 15% effectiveness
Experimental: 25% effectiveness
OK... so technically thats FDA approved as its 10% more effective than the placebo. But what if the supposed inert substance actually caused a drop of effectiveness by say 10%, meaning it contained some chemical that caused an adverse PHYSICAL reaction on the P's condition, well that would mean that the drug that was approvedwas not effective at all, and that the only thing that cured those 25% was the mere suggestion by their doctors that it would. THIER MINDS.
Because there are loose standards surrounding the use of placebo, it is quite possible then (possible) that our capacity to heal ourselves through mere belief alone is in fact greater than what we have been told in some instances.
The research in this article could have immense implications... the article covers almost all the angles, but fails to mention its most fundamental implication and achievement, that the idea that we can heal certain ailments just by believing it may be far greater then we have been lead to... believe!!!!
If you were a drug company and could use a placebo that would make your drug look better and no one would notice because of slack regulation, don't you think you would do it? (assuming your an evil fuckbag that is)
Sorry to be so longwinded, but in order for me to confidently understand something I need to understand its every nuance, writing it out helps, maybe it helped you too, cheers! Now back to the news.
Read the article here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
*Nocebo also means adverse effects due to the participants negative expectations that it wont work, I use it to describe the adverse reactions of a placebo in this write up.
Nocebos fronting as placebos, cracking down on Zcience
A few months back I made some cheeky comment about placebos not actually being inert, in that no substance is entirely 100% inert. Well it turns out I was drawing from the zeitgeist of ideas. I came across this article on the "natural news" (link below), the implications of which were first unclear because of how they talk about it, and how I think, so I thought I would write it out so I could understand what this is all about... and add something that the writer failed to add in the article as he was too excited about the prospect of hammering big pharma. Which is fine, I would be too.
Say you want to test whether or not a drug will clear up cancer.
You make a control group and an experimental group.
In the control group you give participants (P's) a substance which is thought to be inert (usually a sugar pill), and in the experimental group you give them the actual drug you want to test.
Now the trick is that you dont tell the P's that the sugar pill is actually a sugar pill, because you want them to think that they are being given the real drug. Scientists do this because it has been found that if your doctor merely suggests (power of suggestion/ expectancy effect) that something will make you better, that it actually tends to (thus named the placebo effect). It has some kind of psychosomatic effect (mind over matter), maybe it alleviates stress which allows the condition to heal, or perhaps its something more elaborate with regards to belief who knows. The reasons why it works is unclear at this point in the research (at least officially).
So in order to see if a drug actually works, you need to test it against an inert substance. Check.
But here is the problem. As I cheekily uttered in post a month or so ago, there is no such thing as a true dissolvable placebo, as everything you ingest has SOME chemical component which will have SOME physical effect, ranging from minor to significant.
What this article is suggesting is that drug companies are using placebos (that actually cause whatever they are testing to be negatively effected, or nocebos) in order to counteract the participants expectancy effects and make their drug look better by contrast, which could potentially mean that the placebo effect was MORE influential then we are lead to believe it was in some of these experiments.
So say in that experiment above the control group was given this inert pill... but it wasn't actually inert (as discussed its impossible to make it 100%) but in this scenario the pill was actually designed to cause the participants symptoms/ disease to intensify(physical), which is at odds with their belief (psychological) that it will work, and the corresponding placebo effect.
So say the results were such that:
Control group: 15% effectiveness
Experimental: 25% effectiveness
OK... so technically thats FDA approved as its 10% more effective than the placebo. But what if the supposed inert substance actually caused a drop of effectiveness by say 10%, meaning it contained some chemical that caused an adverse PHYSICAL reaction on the P's condition, well that would mean that the drug that was approvedwas not effective at all, and that the only thing that cured those 25% was the mere suggestion by their doctors that it would. THIER MINDS.
Because there are loose standards surrounding the use of placebo, it is quite possible then (possible) that our capacity to heal ourselves through mere belief alone is in fact greater than what we have been told in some instances.
The research in this article could have immense implications... the article covers almost all the angles, but fails to mention its most fundamental implication and achievement, that the idea that we can heal certain ailments just by believing it may be far greater then we have been lead to... believe!!!!
If you were a drug company and could use a placebo that would make your drug look better and no one would notice because of slack regulation, don't you think you would do it? (assuming your an evil fuckbag that is)
Sorry to be so longwinded, but in order for me to confidently understand something I need to understand its every nuance, writing it out helps, maybe it helped you too, cheers! Now back to the news.
Read the article here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/030209_placebo_medical_fraud.html
*Nocebo also means adverse effects due to the participants negative expectations that it wont work, I use it to describe the adverse reactions of a placebo in this write up.
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