Did you get the glasses because you believed they would help your sleep, or for other reasons? One solution to why so many people talk about the improvements with Flux or glasses could be a simple placebo affect.
I totally agree that it may be the placebo effect. However, I feel that it's important to note in discussions of the placebo effect that it's fairly irrelevant whether an intervention works because of the placebo effect or some other reason--what matters is whether the intervention works. And this one does, at least for me.
Note: I'm not accusing you of trying to sell something, I hope my comment doesn't come up that way.
Of course, there are pitfalls. It's important that doctors not lie to their patients, because patients need to trust their doctors, and patients need to be able to make informed choices. And as you pointed out, it's obviously wrong to sell a placebo as if it were not a placebo. But even this doesn't mean placebos are useless: some placebos work even when you know they are placebos[2].
There are many cases where placebo performs better than nothing, and it would be foolish to not use this effect to improve our lives.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3729687/
[2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...
So, overall, it's not clear whether the placebo effect is a real effect that placebos have on patient health, or whether it is an artifact in the data, e.g. due to reporting errors, especially in studies which are not double blind (where the researcher may be biased themselves in the way they are collecting the data). There are also many studies which compare an active substance to a placebo treatment but have no data about patient response under no treatment, which is itself not necessarily 0 [2].
Edit: added a [3] that is explicitly about insomnia - placebo was found to improve subjective perception of sleep quality, but not objective measures (sleep onset latency).
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11372012
[2]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3169222
[3]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
That said, this is just evidence that the placebo effect may not apply in this case. It's not evidence that if interventions only work due to the placebo effect, they don't work. You've convinced me that I'm probably not experiencing benefits from the placebo effect in this case, but that conclusion is unrelated to the conclusion of your previous post.
I'll also add that your assertion that pain perception is the only thing that responds to placebo is incorrect. Placebo is effective on a wide variety of things, including weight loss[1], itching[2], asthma[3] and warts[4] (that last one surprised me).
There's also lots of cases where placebo makes things worse, such as people responding to placebo poison ivy[5].
Finally, there's lots of cases where things which were used in studies for placebos turn out to be active. For example, a study of insulin and chromium in sugary foods for diabetics used apple pie as a control source of sugar, but discovered that the cinnamon in the pie produced a larger effect on insulin resistance than the chromium.
[1] http://www.drsharma.ca/the-power-of-placebo-in-weight-loss-t...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X1...
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4351653/ Note that in this case, symptoms were improved but lung function was not.
[4] https://www.contemporarypediatrics.com/pediatric-dermatology...
[5] http://www.theworldcounts.com/life/potentials/placebo-effect...
[6]
But I am interested in what a death metal sleeping app would actually look like. Of course I would have to ask if it's needed in the market place (does it create value), as opposed to just playing my Demented Ted playlist.
Yes, that was part of my initial point - to the extent that placebo exists, anything can be turned into a placebo with enough marketing. Avoiding blue light could help with sleep quality. Adding more blue light could help with sleep quality. Faith healing could help with sleep quality. Homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, ayurvedic medicine, leeching, blood-letting etc. If it only depends on you believing in it, but it does help, I would recommend the cheapest possible remedy that you can bring yourself to trust, and that doesn't have a proven anti-effect (coffee therapy for curing insomnia may not be an effective treatment).
I also detailed some skepticism of the placebo effect in another response here.
Absence of proof doesn't mean proof of absence. So it may or may not be placebo, but it's an interesting data point for me (just bought blue blocker glasses, plan to try out. At $15-20 per, it's a no-brainer even if it doesn't work out).
So for placebo you should also have a lot of people reporting that "greenish screen" helps, and you should have a green option in flux.
No, it's not. The definition of placebo effect is that a placebo works differently from not placebo.
> Otherwise big pharma would just replace all drugs with sugar pills.
No, because in many cases drugs work better than placebo.
I think the best way to understand a placebo effect is this: If I don't give 100 patients a drug to cure a cough and 30% stop coughing, I have a baseline.
If I give 100 patients a drug to cure a cough and 90% stop coughing I can say my drug is effective.
If I give 100 patients a sugar pill and tell them it will cure a cough and 60% stop coughing I can say this is better than my baseline and the placebo effect is present.
If I give 100 patients a sugar pill and tell them it will cure a sneeze and 60% stop coughing and nobody stops sneezing, then I need to revisit my previous study to find out if sugar can cure a cough. But in this case you don't have a placebo effect because the patients believed the pill was to address a sneeze.