It seems to me that the medical profession already has enough bias to defend the fruits of their own research and claim ownership over a capacity to offer that which cannot be achieved through other means.
The idea that a placebo is as effective as some intervention is not evidence of efficacy of placebo — it’s evidence of lack of efficacy of the interventions ... if what you have to offer can’t beat doing nothing, then you shouldn’t be charging for it ...
It makes sense, but is it always true? Especially with antidepressant drugs. There are lots of studies like 'Placebo patients had the same result as patients on drug X', but how do we find out if X is not needed for everyone? How do we get our minds to cope with the thought of X being useless?
I am not really sure. Only my feeling says that i would love to get lied to in this situation
Could we use a range of placebos in order to better control for the effect of statistical outliers? I feel like the uniformity implied by “placebo=sugar pill” might not be rich enough to account for the range of effects that might be at work ... I actually agree that the belief that something effective is being done could play a real role in actual healing — but I don’t think it’s been shown by any of these studies that this manner of belief can be meaningfully packaged into a one size fits all sugar pill...
The idea that a placebo is as effective as some intervention is not evidence of efficacy of placebo — it’s evidence of lack of efficacy of the interventions ... if what you have to offer can’t beat doing nothing, then you shouldn’t be charging for it ...