{"id":1361,"date":"2016-02-07T15:07:43","date_gmt":"2016-02-07T20:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/?p=1361"},"modified":"2023-10-09T13:10:58","modified_gmt":"2023-10-09T17:10:58","slug":"the-placebo-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/?p=1361","title":{"rendered":"The Placebo Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A placebo is an innocuous substance which has no medicinal properties… often the proverbial ‘sugar pill’.\u00a0 It can also be a procedure, or an injection.\u00a0 While placebos do not actually act on a disease, disease agent, or other condition; many people report feeling better or otherwise enhanced by taking them.\u00a0 This is the placebo effect, a trick of the mind or the ability of the mind to naturally relieve pain and produce other temporary effects.\u00a0 There is an opposite effect also, called nocebo effect where the placebo causes adverse side effects like aches, vomiting, etc.\u00a0 In other words, the effects of the placebo are caused by the patients expectations.<\/p>\n

The placebo effect does not work on animals, since they have no expectations about it.\u00a0 However, an animal’s owner may think his pet dog is doing\/feeling better after giving the dog an unknown placebo based on his own subjective judgements about the animal.<\/p>\n

A Harvard medical school professor, Ted Kaptchuk, did a study comparing the effects of acupuncture versus an albuterol inhaler for treating asthma symptoms.\u00a0 \u00a0While the patients receiving acupuncture treatments reported being less short of breath, lung function tests showed no improvement.\u00a0 Patients receiving the albuterol did show positive lung function improvements.\u00a0 This points out a danger of the placebo effect…. patients receiving the acupuncture treatments did not know they were not any better, and could be in serious life threatening trouble.<\/p>\n

Because of the placebo effect, testimonials about health\/drug products are useless and prove nothing.\u00a0 People who buy into a drug or device based on testimonials already have a psychological investment in that product.\u00a0 Because of this psychological (and monetary) investment, they are more likely to experience a positive placebo effect, and then make a positive testimonial about it.\u00a0 On the other hand, if no positive effect is produced, the user\/buyer simply discards it, and most importantly doesn’t waste time and energy writing a negative testimonial.\u00a0 Psychology biases the testimonials to be positive.\u00a0 Because of this, scams abound.\u00a0 Some examples include taking minute (teaspoon) sized doses of ionic silver, Hulda Clark’s zapper, electrolytic foot baths, etc.<\/p>\n

Scientists know that the gold standard method of ruling out the placebo effect with drugs is the double blind study.\u00a0 In a double blind study, neither the patient nor the clinician knows whether the drug he is dispensing is a real drug or a placebo.\u00a0 If the test results show that the positive effects for the real drug are about the same as the placebo, then the researcher knows that the drug is not really effective.\u00a0 Double blinding is especially important when dealing with subjective symptoms such as pain as opposed to measurable signs like blood parameters.<\/p>\n

While the double blind testing procedure works\u00a0 for drugs, it of course cannot be used for everything.\u00a0 Its impossible to double blind a surgical procedure for example.\u00a0 The cardiac surgeon knows whether he bypassed an artery or not.\u00a0 This has lead to some totally ineffective procedures.\u00a0 For example, when X-rays were first becoming available, people were x-rayed in a standing position, and doctors would diagnose them with sagging organs.\u00a0 To correct the ‘sagging organs’, surgeons would open up the patient and tie their internal organs to their rib cage.\u00a0 The patients reported feeling better, but of course their organs were not out of place to begin with…. doctors thought they were because doctors trained in anatomy with their cadavers lieing down on a table top.<\/p>\n

Even heart catheterization may be a placebo effect.\u00a0 The Mayo clinic had this to say about stents:<\/p>\n

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Quote<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Balloon and stents are suitable for reducing complaints, i.e. for relieving symptoms.
\nBalloons and stents do not prevent heart attacks and do not prolong life.
\nStents prevent the development of renewed stenoses at the same location in the vessel, but do not reduce the frequency of heart attacks or deaths.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Then if the only positive effect of stenting coronary arteries is reducing symptoms, its quite possible that it is merely the placebo effect.
\nSo why is stenting so prevalent?\u00a0 It produces huge amounts of revenues for doctors and hospitals.\u00a0 Follow the money trail is always good advice.<\/p>\n

Then, in the absence of double blind studies, we have to rely on testable scientific evidence to determine whether a substance or procedure works.\u00a0 As an example, chelation treatments to remove calcified plaques from arteries has not been studied using double blind techniques.\u00a0 However, the reduction of calcium in the coronary arteries has been proven by the Cardiac Calcium Scoring Test, which is an objective, quantifiable test procedure.<\/p>\n

This is also the case with colloidal silver, as to my knowledge there has never been any double blind testing.\u00a0 With colloidal silver, there is a multitude of laboratory research showing not only that silver nanoparticles kill pathogens, but also important insights into how they do it.\u00a0 So colloidal silver is not dependent on anecdotal testimonial evidence for validation.\u00a0 \u00a0Compare that to a Hulda Clark zapper which has no bonafide scientific research and backing, but only relies on testimonials, driven by the placebo effect.<\/p>\n

The cost of the placebo effect is bad drugs, bad devices, expensive health care, and poorer health.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A placebo is an innocuous substance which has no medicinal properties… often the proverbial ‘sugar pill’.\u00a0 It can also be a procedure, or an injection.\u00a0 While placebos do not actually act on a disease, disease agent, or other condition; many …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1361"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1645,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1361\/revisions\/1645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wgpeters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}