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There is a dark side to placebo research and especially the work of Ted Kaptchuk and it is this: patients often report feeling better after a placebo treatment,

There is a dark side to placebo research and especially the work of Ted Kaptchuk and it is this: patients often report feeling better after a placebo treatment, and they subjectively do, but their condition has not actually improved and they still need proper treatment. The recent albuterol vs. placebo trial reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) found that experimental subjects with asthma experienced substantial, measured improvements in lung function after inhaling albuterol, but not after inhaling placebo, undergoing sham acupuncture, or “no treatment.” It also found that the same subjects reported having felt substantially improved after either albuterol or each of the two sham treatments, but not after “no treatment.” Anthropologist Daniel Moerman, in an accompanying editorial, wrote, “the authors conclude that the patient reports were ‘unreliable,’ since they reported improvement when there was none”—precisely as any rational clinician or biomedical scientist would have concluded. That's another study he was involved with. Full details here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doctors-and-a-dummy-degree-part-2-0-harvard-medical-school-and-the-curious-case-of-ted-kaptchuk-omd/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doctor...

agumonkey 5y ago
Are there any other studies outside of asthma ? emotional stress is highly coupled with lung/cardiovascular function. When I had bad asthma, the difference between me staying at home and me going to ER was anxiety. So even if placebo is just that, an emotional ease, it triggers somatic effects that eases the asthmatic response.
- jVinc 5y ago
  You're trying to make an argument as to why the placebo indirectly could have had an actual effect, but this is exactly what the study showed that id did not have. There was no effect, only a reported improvement which did not correspond to an actual improvement. eg. "Study reported the subject did not see any red apples, only green" and your asking "Maybe the subject was wearing tinted glasses that could made a green apple seem red?" The answer is obviously no, that cannot be the case, because that would have led to an observed red apple, and there was no such observation. Just like there was no observed improvement in the asthmatic response from the placebo, then it's also obvious that there was no indirect improvement from emotional ease, because if that was the case, then there had to have been an observed improvement.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Taking medication appears to have become a ritual that we have to go through to become healthy even when the problem is psychological in nature.
dqpb 5y ago
Isn’t that true for many drugs?

agumonkey 5y ago

Are there any other studies outside of asthma ? emotional stress is highly coupled with lung/cardiovascular function. When I had bad asthma, the difference between me staying at home and me going to ER was anxiety. So even if placebo is just that, an emotional ease, it triggers somatic effects that eases the asthmatic response.

jVinc 5y ago
You're trying to make an argument as to why the placebo indirectly could have had an actual effect, but this is exactly what the study showed that id did not have. There was no effect, only a reported improvement which did not correspond to an actual improvement. eg. "Study reported the subject did not see any red apples, only green" and your asking "Maybe the subject was wearing tinted glasses that could made a green apple seem red?" The answer is obviously no, that cannot be the case, because that would have led to an observed red apple, and there was no such observation. Just like there was no observed improvement in the asthmatic response from the placebo, then it's also obvious that there was no indirect improvement from emotional ease, because if that was the case, then there had to have been an observed improvement.
imtringued 5y ago
Taking medication appears to have become a ritual that we have to go through to become healthy even when the problem is psychological in nature.

dqpb 5y ago

Isn’t that true for many drugs?