5 ms·

This included 8 hours of vomiting no mater how hard I willed it to stop or other remedies I tried, and it didn't work on the first dose It seems very plausible

• giantg2 5y ago
  Why? One could say that about any duration, right?
  • jrmg 5y ago
    Totally. And it would be more probable as time goes on, since you couldn’t really go on vomiting for ever (unless the illness was way more serious!) 8 hours seems pretty ‘normal’ from the few times I’ve been ill like this though - would basically feel like ‘most of a day’ or ‘most of a night’.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I think we are thinking of different things. Continuously vomiting every 5-15 minutes for 8 hours to the point of just green bile coming up is pretty serious (dehydration is a huge concern), in my opinion. This sort of vomiting seems to be an uncontrollable involuntary response.
  • daveguy 5y ago
    Yes. You would have to have a placebo controlled test to confirm placebo vs "just happens to last 8 hours". This is what placebo controls are for.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I generally agree. The secondary (and more interesting) question is whether placebo effect is applicable to infants. Based on the theory of how placebo works, it seems it might not be. It seems there are no studies on that. At least I couldn't find any.
      • tsimionescu 5y ago
        Placebo mostly just means "good effect unrelated to intended treatment (active substance, surgical procedure etc)". That can include psychological effects of treatment (such as in pain management, depression, heart rate and blood pressure, and a handful of others). More commonly though, the placebo effect is just natural progression of the disease, errors in data collection (such as patients trying to be helpful and confirming that vague symptoms have somewhat improved), or errors in data analysis (such as lab techs thinking they've seen something in the sample that they expected to see there). The psychological effects may or may not apply to infants - that's a somewhat separate question. The other effects definitely do - it's perfectly plausible that a lab tech looking for an improvement in an infant's blood sample after treatment "finds" it.
        • giantg2 5y ago
          I would consider those other effects to be bias, controlled via some other mechanism like a study being double blind. For example, lab techs shouldn't even know whose sample they're testing, let alone that patient's treatment, whether they're involved in a study, or the expected outcome. So I do agree these other effects exist, but I don't think they exist under the classification of placebo effect. It's possible one of these is at play in this study.
  • exporectomy 5y ago
    Yes, whatever the duration, you'll eventually stop vomiting some time after taking the medicine. Sometimes by chance it will seem like a remarkably short time from medicine to cure compared to the duration of the sickness. This is how a lot of ineffective traditional medicines "work". For a cold or nausea, nearly everyone will experience their problem fixing itself after taking the medicine and combined with cultural beliefs, use that to convince themselves that the medicine treated the disease. Just look at the number of people online who credit some (real) medicine with some outcome despite the fact that they have no way of knowing causation. Or young people who say "I don't drink FooBar type of alcohol because it makes me vomit." after one occasion getting plastered and ending up vomiting. It's good old mind-tricks of correlation vs causation. There's a reason real medicine requires preregistered double blind trials. It's just far too easy to get causation wrong without using rigorous scientific methods.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      "Yes, whatever the duration, you'll eventually stop vomiting some time after taking the medicine." That's a gross oversimplification. You could continue to vomit. You could also die. There are multiple types/causes for vomiting. Not all vomiting simply stops on it's own. "It's good old mind-tricks of correlation vs causation." I'd say this is more than just mind tricks. The study shows there's a strong correlation and evident effects, which suggests studies should be done on the cause. "There's a reason real medicine requires preregistered double blind trials." Or in this case a grandfathered status (it is a "real" medicine as it is approved for sale). I also think this is, again, only a half truth. Double blind studies tend to provide the strongest evidence, but they are not the only kind of study accepted for drug approval.
      • exporectomy 5y ago
        Mostly vomiting stops on its own and people don't die. Even when someone dies, it won't break the beliefs of survivors because they don't believe it works 100% of the time anyway. In your case, you even took an ineffective dose of Emetrol but still believed in its effectiveness despite that! How many ineffective doses would it take for you to not credit Emertol with stopping the vomiting? If there's a scientific study, that might show something better than the giant fail-fest of cultural medical knowledge. I don't know of any human society that hasn't at least historically had a bunch of ineffective medicine that was widely used. Even modern western society probably has some - such as this Emetrol perhaps or wrong results of drug trials. An extreme case is China where normal doctors in hospitals routinely prescribe herbal remedies alongside conventional medicine.