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by tokenadult
4503 days ago
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Thanks for your comments on the quoted researchers. I have been trying to find the DIRECT link to a quotation from Fabrizio Benedetti, a co-author of one of the most cited papers who is also a medical doctor, in which he sums up his view this way: "I am a doctor, it is true, but I am mainly a neurophysiologist, so I use the placebo response as a model to understand how our brain works. I am not sure that in the future it will have a clinical application." (The stuff in the quotation marks appears online in articles on other websites, but I don't know specifically when Benedetti said that, except it was after his most famous paper, co-authored with Kaptchuk.) The state of the art since 2008 has not been an advance in finding clinically useful placebo effects so much as it has been an advance in finding statistical flaws in previous studies of placebos. I really appreciated your comments in dialogue with another participant in this same thread about what the research shows, and indeed how one might define "placebo effect," and I'll have to digest that for the next time this issue comes up here on HN. Thanks. |
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I think that I am somewhat biased, given that I started a PhD in the placebo effect around then, so I actually (sortof) know all of these people. I would argue that there are a few problems with placebo research as currently practiced.
1) clinical studies without no-treatment arms 2) Relatively small experimental studies with not completely explicit treatment protocols 3) A fascination with colourful brain images at the expense of good experimental design (though that is sadly not limited to placebo research).
Statistics is very, very difficult to get right (and I've often struggled) and the incentives are not lined up in the correct way. For instance, if I find a counter-intuitive results in an experiment, it does not benefit me to engage in rigorous fact-checking, I am more likely to benefit if I just publish it, given the demands of tenure-track. To be honest, its a wonder any science gets done at all.
And hence why I no longer work in science.