Things you find while conversing on Quora

[drwex]

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-are-you-there/

Very interesting piece - a translation of a 2015 French paper that argues we colloquially overstate the placebo effect by quite a lot. The authors argue that many studies reporting a large effect fail to take into account statistical and other factors, and suffer from methodological flaws. Basically, drug studies can be sloppy.

(I'm having a lot of trouble writing content posts. SAD is in full swing, Arisia is heating up and consuming lots of my extra hours, and now I'm down with a cold. Yay, go me.)

Comments

[corylea]

I hope your cold gets better soon!

Psychologists are appalled at how bad most physicians are at conducting research; in the program where I got my first PhD (the one in social psychology), we were basically told not to believe medical studies unless we'd read them and evaluated the experimental design. This is very far from what the general public believes about physicians, so I remember how surprised all the grad students were when we were told this. :-)

Of course, in social psychology we study such messy variables as sex and race and social class, so we needed impeccable experimental design to be able to conclude anything at all. :-)

[dianec42]

I am glad to see you posting. Go you, indeed!

[tpau]

interesting. one of the things i have been hearding muttered- mostly among npr science shows- is that the placebo effect is increasing above its usual 33%....