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If the placebo effect is superstition, as most comments in this thread seem to imply, how come pharmaceutical companies are finding it increasingly hard to beat

• thirdtruck 14y ago
  Basically, the "effect" is the margin of error under which variations in self-healing, self-reporting, and researcher bias obscure actual effect. As we address more and more of the "big" pharmaceutical effects, that only leaves the very minor ones or big ones that only apply to increasingly thinner edge cases. If the human body was software, one might say that the pharmaceutical companies have debugged it to the point that they have little left to find other than kilobyte-sized memory leaks. Beyond that, the vast majority of the blue-screening issues remain PEBKAC errors.