The mysterious workings of the Placebo Effect have taken a new twist. A research team from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, and The University of Toledo, US, have found, by experiment, that a placebo cream (that’s to say a faux medical cream with absolutely no active ingredients) can be quite effective even when it’s not used. “We […]
Tag: placebo
Underplayed redundancy in placebo effect research (on cheap vs costly fake medicine)
A celebrated 2015 research paper makes much the same discovery as a paper that won an Ig Nobel Prize for medicine years earlier. The discovery is about the power of pricing fake medicines. The new paper makes only an indirect, beery allusion to the earlier, Ig Nobel Prize-winning research. That 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine […]
How to ‘cheat’ at sport without really ‘cheating’ – part 2: Placebos
In the previous item in this series Improbable looked at the question of whether ‘praying to win’ at sports might be ‘unsporting’. One aspect (which wasn’t mentioned) is a possible scenario whereby those who pray to win might gain an advantage by a kind-of ‘Divine Placebo’ effect – that’s to say they might try just […]
Cheap quasi-repeat of a dear study of cheap-versus-dear fake medicines
A new, celebrated medical paper echoes the beloved study that long ago earned an Ig Nobel Prize for medicine. The Los Angeles Times summarizes the new study, with the headline: “‘Expensive’ placebos work better than ‘cheap’ ones, study finds“. The new study is: “Placebo effect of medication cost in Parkinson disease,” Alberto J. Espay [pictured here], MD, […]