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You can just use the standard sugar pill placebo. But of course make sure the placebo group get the same treatment of lying on a couch and listening to music wi
by hristov 6y ago
You can just use the standard sugar pill placebo. But of course make sure the placebo group get the same treatment of lying on a couch and listening to music with their eyes closed. I am sure the psychedelic effects of shrooms would increase the placebo effect greatly, so sugar pill placebo might not correctly show the placebo effect, but it is a start.
- ramraj07 6y agoHow about the combination of the drug and the experience is the treatment? In that case the placebo is telling someone with depression to sign up and stay at home. Which is still important.
- jolmg 6y ago> so sugar pill placebo might not correctly show the placebo effect The lack of good placebo options seems to be why they chose not to have a placebo. The paper mentions: > Although placebo and active treatment controlled designs are widely used in therapeutic trials, they too have limitations owing to the highly discriminable effects of psilocybin.
- hristov 6y agoThat seems a bit of copout though. Yes, sugar pill will not have a as high placebo effect but it is still useful as setting a lower bound on the placebo effect.
- jolmg 6y agoWouldn't it complicate things by introducing a new variable to consider, i.e. how gullible is each participant / how affected were they by the placebo? For what it's worth, it seems more useful to not have that variable. That way, if the effect was from the psilocybin acting as placebo, at least you know they were all affected equally. There were too few participants too. Having a control group with a placebo would make the experimental sample even smaller.