A non-active treatment used in clinical trials so the effect of being treated can be distinguished from the effect the active treatment being tested. Necessary because the effect of being treated often induces significant improvement even when the treatment has no demonstrable activity.
Questions tagged [placebo]
14 questions
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5 answers
Is the placebo effect a purely psychological effect?
The placebo effect plays a crucial role in clinical trials and in our understanding of medicine, but I have always had some difficulty in understanding how exactly it works.
Is it a purely psychological effect, that you feel better because of the…
Mad Scientist
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Can I get high using binaural beats?
Some sites claim that you can get high using binaural beats:
All I-Doser doses are tested by a panel of users who consider themselves experienced in binaural beat modification. A dose is not passed on to the I-Doser Store until it is proven working…
Sklivvz
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Can the placebo effect be observed in experiments conducted on animals or babies?
In a paper defending homeopathy, it is argued that the observed benefits of homeopathic treatments cannot be attributed to the placebo effect because the treatments elicit similar benefits when used on babies and animals, who can have no…
Monkey Tuesday
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Is the placebo effect getting stronger?
There has recently been a row about the marketing of pain killers. The makers of Nurofen have been accused of selling the same formulation at different prices for different conditions and claiming in advertising that they are "targeted" at…
matt_black
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Did a nocebo study find that rashes could swap hands?
In an answer to another question, the following story was cited.
Another interesting one that demonstrates both the placebo and nocebo effect in one study is a study done by Japanese researches on 57 high school aged boys. They selected these boys…
Oddthinking
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Is the placebo effect dependent on the amount of belief in it?
For example, are people with habitually skeptical attitudes less likely to benefit from the placebo effect? Has this been studied? (For instance, one might seek a correlation based on professions such as law enforcement, science, etc.)
Example…
Larry OBrien
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Are expensive placebos more effective than cheap placebos?
In a recent Undercover Economist column in the Financial Times (The Ig Nobel prizes: in praise of ridiculous research), Tim Harford mentioned that there has been a study showing that cheap placebos are less medically effective than expensive…
matt_black
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Have throat lozenges been shown to be ineffective?
I am currently suffering a sore throat. I have purchased some Betadine (gargleable iodine) which I believe and hope actually helps reduce the extent of the infection.
At the risk of derision, I will confess I have also purchased Strepsils…
Oddthinking
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9
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Does Chinese astrology influence death rates?
In Joseph Henrich's book The secret of our Success he discusses the importance of culture as a factor in the rise to success of Homo sapiens.
In chapter 14 he specifically discusses examples where culture has large effects on people's biology. The…
matt_black
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Is the placebo effect effective?
I've seen many studies comparing proposed cures to placebo, but what about any studies actually investigating the effectiveness of placebo effect itself?
So, has there been any study as to the effectiveness of placebo in ameliorating certain…
luvieere
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Do placebos have an effect on ulcers
Do placebos have a measureable impact on healing gastric ulcers?
On TED.com Ben Goldacre makes the claim:
We know for example that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for getting rid of gastric ulcers than one sugar pill a day. Two…
Christian
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Did a prisoner die from a needle prick when he was told that it was a snake bite?
I read somewhere that there was a prisoner facing a death sentence sometime before the 1950s, on whom a psychological experiment was conducted.
Experiment:
He was blindfolded and told that he would be killed by a bite by a venomous snake. But in…
noobs
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Is there a pressure point under the nose that can eliminate the urge to sneeze?
There's a pressure point under your nose that, if you press it, temporarily stops the sneeze reflex.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiSneezeFinger
One of several places this is written about. Now, when I hear "pressure point", I…
DarkLightA
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How can a skeptic benefit from placebo effect?
Gullible people believe in every new alternative medicine miraculous treatment procedures. For every one of then, you don't need to go too far to learn that the efficacy is not different from placebo effect efficacy.
But indeed placebo effect is a…
ariel
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