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, […]
A cheerfully depressing investigation: “Which Placebo to Cure Depression?”
This study pokes a pointed stick into lots of questions about medicine, science, and scholarship. The lead author writes (in a note to us) that “It addresses a paradox in modern medicine: antidepressants are often considered to be mere placebos [1] despite the fact that meta-analyses are able to rank them [2]: it follows that it […]
Concentrated (info about) placebos
Daniel Keough munges together many of the paradoxes of this thing called a placebo: (Thanks to investigator Fred Essex for bringing this to our attention.) BONUS: Dan Ariely describes much the same landscape:
Placebos, placebos…
Universal Placebos gathers news, research, and musings about placebos, and even offers some for sale. Another good, rich source, of course is Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational — both the book and the associated ever-growing web site. Both include accounts of Ariely’s Ig Nobel Prize-winning research, which demonsrated that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than […]