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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

As I've said before, this article is incredibly wrong and quite misleading. If you ever wanted evidence that most Americans do not understand how medicines are developed or what the Placebo Effect is, this article (and the responses here) serve as ample evidence.

For a more rigorous refutation by a trained professional, please read: http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1248

I'll pull the zinger quote from the article above for you:

>No, it’s not like that at all. Perhaps the studies are just that well done, or maybe the drugs being developed suck, or maybe companies are studying more candidate drugs and screening for efficacy. Just about any explanation that doesn’t involve aliens is better than “placebo is getting stronger”.

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It is really so ridiculous to think that there is some drug such that:

* The drug provides a modest health improvement.

* That health improvement happens to be smaller than the health improvement do to the placebo effect?

I don't know what the typical magnitude of the placebo effect is. If it is substantial, then actually working, actually helpful drugs might be being denied to people. The very mechanisms for the placebo effect he hypothesizes (e.g. people taking care of their health when on a study) certainly seem like they might vary with our culture...

All I can say is, you do not know what the Placebo effect is. You don't understand why you cannot use it as a therapeutic invention. You do not understand why most drugs benefit from the placebo effect already.

Please, pleasepleaseplease go and read up on what it actually is.

Woah there tiger-- where do you get that I am suggesting using the placebo as a therapeutic invention!? (If it makes any difference, I meant to type "due to" rather than "do to"). I am suggesting that the following situation might exist:

1) Drug A is 5% effective

2) Placebo is 10% effective

3) No one ever gets the benefits of drug A, since its benefits are masked during trial.

A placebo gets used to determine the margin of error for a particular test. The drug being tested must show significant improvements over the placebo's measurements in order to prove that it is effective.

If your theoretical Drug A performs worse than the placebo, then the effectiveness that it had should be considered to be within the margin of error, and therefore not better than taking nothing at all.

Well... But since placebos can't be used therapeutically, and Drug A can, doesn't that make it better than nothing?

If the drug can't outperform the placebo, then it doesn't make it better than nothing because you're adding chemistry to your body without any assurance that it's going to actually do anything.

But "the placebo" is not a static thing. If we designed experiments differently, the placebo effect might be able to be reduced (say to 3%), in which case drug A would now beat it.

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