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Comment by dvh1990 | Hacker News Reader

dvh1990

If you know it's a placebo, it won't work. Folks, please don't buy sugar pills.

You might find this interesting.

> Half of the study volunteers were told they were getting an “open-label” placebo and the others got nothing at all. He found that there was a dramatic and significant improvement in the placebo group’s IBS symptoms, even though they were explicitly told they were getting a “sugar pill” without any active medication.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/placebo-can-work-even-kn...

The story of placebos is actually pretty complex.

Some of them may have thought the researchers were lying about it being a sugar pill and was actually active

Yeah, I'm not sure that would work outside the environment of a study.

Thought: They should give some cash and instruct the participants to buy a specific OTC brand that is known to be placebo themselves so they have confidence that it is a placebo.

James Randi tried to overdose with a fatal dose of Homeopathic Sleeping Pills, but couldn't.

Homeopathy, quackery and fraud | James Randi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Z7KeNCi7g

>http://www.ted.com Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world's psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I'll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)

Minor correction:

There were actually more than a thousand people who took James Randi’s “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge” between 1964 and 2015, many of them live on stage or broadcast on live television. No one ever successfully completed the scientific testing and won the prize, though.

The Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge was terminated in early 2015 when James Randi retired, so it is no longer available for new applicants today.

You really have to look into the details here. Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk is a an infamous alt medicine advocate[0] and his manipulations are well documented.

In this case the subjects were told "this is a placebo, it has no active ingredients but it can still help you" and that makes all the difference.

In a similar study, when patients are told "this is a placebo, it has no active ingredients and will do nothing at all when you take it" they have little to no relief.

0. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dummy-medicine-dummy-doctor...

I’m interested to learn more but I didn’t find any references to the IBS study in the webpage you linked. But to be fair I skimmed it.

While that may be true, I find it repulsing that somebody somewhere is charging real money for placebo effect results.

Actually, studies have shown that placebos work sometimes even when people know. This is a great podcast about this topic and the page also has links to some studies: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/29/718227789/all-the-worlds-a-st...

From one of the studies [1]: >Patients were randomized to either open-label placebo pills presented as “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes” or no-treatment controls with the same quality of interaction with providers.

I wonder what the results would have been with a less suggestive presentation.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

> “Sure it does. The bucket method works whether or not you believe in it.”

> “That’s absurd!” sputters Mark. “I don’t believe in magic that works whether or not you believe in it!”

> “I said that too,” chimes in Autrey. “Apparently I was wrong.”

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple...

And if you know that your anxiety condition is irrational, it will just go away (/s). Our minds are much more complex than statements on a whiteboard.

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