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Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but there was an article posted a few days ago about how Reiki can't possibly work but it still does.

IMO the only way to blind this is to put people in an automated machine that either turns the magnet on or it doesn't (and it makes some noises either way). You can't have highly trained professionals in the loop making people feel valuable by giving them all this attention, as that could be a confounding effect in both the alleged-treatment and the alleged-placebo.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22764824

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> IMO the only way to blind this is to put people in an automated machine that either turns the magnet on or it doesn't (and it makes some noises either way). You can't have highly trained professionals in the loop making people feel valuable by giving them all this attention, as that could be a confounding effect in both the alleged-treatment and the alleged-placebo.

It's fine as long as both the experimental group and the control group get the same amount of attention, right? If both groups show the same amount of improvement, that means it was caused entirely by the attention, not by the magnetic treatment.

This probably only works if the professionals are blinded to whether the machine is enabled

That's what the "double" in double-blind means

msandford is saying that you can only run an experiment like this and get good results if the treatment is administered entirely by a machine. PhasmaFelis is saying that as long as both groups get similar amounts of professional attention then you can still get good results. I'm saying that to make sure you get equal levels of professional attention you need to blind the professionals to whether the machine is enabled.

(I agree that this is what the "double" in "double blind" means, but that's not what we were talking about.)

In that case, let's just call it triple-blind... /s

@jefft that's what "double-blind" means.

That is captured in the double-blind design.

Note that with Reiki, it's a little more complicated to properly blind (this is an issue for pretty much every physical therapy, and surgery).

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