placebo (Page 2)

Researchers are so excited about the placebo effect that the NIH (National Institutes of Health) has started a special study of it. One of their discoveries is that, although it all takes place inside our brains, for some unknown reason it seems to be working BETTER than it used to. This is a subject that Anne Strieber discusses with Mark Waldman in this week’s Dreamland.

From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after clinical trials where they were first tested against placebo rose by 20%, meaning that the placebos were working better. Half of all potential new drugs fail in late stage trials due to their inability to beat sugar pills.
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But why? – Nobody can figure out why, but placebos are working better than ever. Are people more gullible than they used to be?

In Wired.com, Steve Silberman reports on a major drug company that was losing money because it hadn’t introduced a new drug in 3 years. They decided to come out with an antidepressant. It performed beautifully in tests, but was later found, like many of these drugs, to be merely a placebo. Silberman writes, “The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today’s economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.
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…doesn’t really work! – Placebos are a sham, but the kind that doctors and researchers use. They’re usually mere sugar pills in disguise, which are used in a clinical treatment study. The effectiveness of the actual medication is compared with the placebo to determine if the medication works. For some people, the placebo works nearly as well as the medication, but why they work at all, remains a mystery. It turns out that one of the medicines that most of us rely on is just a placebo. One researcher says, “You might as well rub your skin with a bit of spit.”
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When is a placebo not a placebo? When it’s a nocebo.

Can we THINK ourselves to death? In New Scientist, Helen Pilcher tells the story of a US man who was told by a local witch doctor that he was going to die. He promptly took to his bed and began to do so. When he was admitted to the hospital, his wife told one of his doctors, Drayton Doherty, what had happened.
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