Have you heard this before? In clinical trials, medicines have to be compared to a placebo to separate the effect of the medicine from the psychological effect of taking the drug. The patient's belief in the power of the medicine has a strong effect on its own. In fact, for some drugs such as antidepressants, the psychological effect of taking a pill is larger than the effect of the drug. It may even be worth it to give a patient an ineffective medicine just to benefit from the placebo effect. This is the conventional wisdom that I took for granted until recently.

I no longer believe any of it, and the short answer as to why is that big meta-analysis on the placebo effect. That meta-analysis collected all the studies they could find that did "direct" measurements of the placebo effect. In addition to a placebo group that could [...]

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First published:
June 10th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpd83h5XHgWCxnv3h/why-i-don-t-believe-in-the-placebo-effect

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.