Admiral Valdemar wrote:The placebo effect is a funny thing. It can be used to validate a personal belief in a therapy when no professional organisation can find anything above chance effects in double-blind studies.
A quick point - Medical studies aren't generally looking for results above chance, they're looking for results above placebo. That accounts for the actual effects of placebo.
Homeopathy does produce a placebo effect in people who believe in it, as is noted in this meta-analysis of studies into it, but nothing more than placebo.
As is noted in Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason and also in Dr. Ben Goldacre's Lancet piece, the only significant benefit over a medically prescribed placebo that modern homeopathic therapy has is that the practicioners spend a lot of time talking to their patients on a personal level, which most medical doctors simply don't have time for given the amount of demand for their time, and which in itself is a benefit, especially in cases with psychosocial components.
A mistake in word use on my part, I was thinking more of the water dowsing experiments and my own work in Big Pharma R&D rather than medical investigations.
It's something we've had mentioned in previous threads on healthcare, that in this quota meeting world we live in with far too few doctors and nurses to ordinary citizens, the best thing to work on with no real monetary input would be bedside manner. Listening to people without running up a £100/hour bill they can later get stressed over is just the first step.
Since these people are already shifting over to alternative therapies for this very reason, even if they do not consciously understand it, I can only suggest the NHS work on addressing this issue with standard care. That way, we clamp down on snake oil and also give people a reason to believe in actual medicine with a compassionate touch. Mind over matter is a powerful thing and no one has ever dismissed the placebo effect as being useless within modern medicine, we've simply neglected it and shifted it over to the quacks who have only ever had that effect.
Norseman wrote:What this means is that for several decades the Homeopaths were able to offer a product that was demonstrably better, one that would stand up to any amount of statistical scrutiny.
I think there's a tendency among a lot of people to assume that all of the sciences mature at the same rate. So the fact that physics was in the Newtonian era at the time implies to them that medicine was similarly superior to medieval thinking. But that's just not the case; we're talking about the American Civil War era here, and medical science was still largely medieval. At the time, physics had raced far ahead of other branches of science. Even today, physics is far closer to being a "complete" science than medicine can seriously hope to be.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
The irony is that nowadays physics has gotten a stitch and is now lagging behind in number of advances compared to the other areas of science. While it is still looking for that elusive Grand Unified Theory after pesky quantum mechanics appeared, the likes of biotechnology have moved leaps and bounds leading to a very lucrative industry in commerce.
