I strongly suspect you are wrong since the placebo effect has been around since well before multivitamins and similar things were at all common. But the hypothesis seems worth testing.
Wasn’t there some research indicating that the placebo effect has gotten stronger recently? Perhaps this effect, combined with the increased prevalence of vitamins and higher fraction of patients with unrelated prescriptions, could explain the increase.
Is this your source for the claim that the placebo effect has gotten stronger? It merely claims that the gap between a placebo and real drug has gotten smaller, while your theory predicts that they would both grow, the gap unchanged. And the evidence is that lots of new drugs don’t work, which is easy to explain other ways. It does claim that placebo response to antidepressants is larger than it used to be, but depression is difficult to measure and it is easy to believe that this is a different population that wouldn’t have been treated earlier.
I believe that a less specific version of your hypothesis is commonly accepted: being part of a medical trial gets people better health care. I’m pretty sure that it has been repeatedly measured that compliance is higher in studies than in nature, the usual explanation being attention. I don’t know if compliance for medicine outside of the study has been measured.
This is a good point. It drastically increases my estimate probability of your hypothesis being correct.
I would have guessed that the primary reason why the placebo effect has gotten stronger is that people believe in medicine more. There have been studies that show a stronger placebo effect if things feel more medical, such as making the sugar pills not taste good or the like. This suggests that the belief level can be quite malleable. But this now makes me extremely interested in your hypothesis.
I strongly suspect you are wrong since the placebo effect has been around since well before multivitamins and similar things were at all common. But the hypothesis seems worth testing.
Wasn’t there some research indicating that the placebo effect has gotten stronger recently? Perhaps this effect, combined with the increased prevalence of vitamins and higher fraction of patients with unrelated prescriptions, could explain the increase.
Is this your source for the claim that the placebo effect has gotten stronger?
It merely claims that the gap between a placebo and real drug has gotten smaller, while your theory predicts that they would both grow, the gap unchanged. And the evidence is that lots of new drugs don’t work, which is easy to explain other ways. It does claim that placebo response to antidepressants is larger than it used to be, but depression is difficult to measure and it is easy to believe that this is a different population that wouldn’t have been treated earlier.
I believe that a less specific version of your hypothesis is commonly accepted: being part of a medical trial gets people better health care. I’m pretty sure that it has been repeatedly measured that compliance is higher in studies than in nature, the usual explanation being attention. I don’t know if compliance for medicine outside of the study has been measured.
It got stronger in anti-depressant trials after successful anti-depressant drugs were heavily marketed. The traditional theory explains this readily.
This is a good point. It drastically increases my estimate probability of your hypothesis being correct.
I would have guessed that the primary reason why the placebo effect has gotten stronger is that people believe in medicine more. There have been studies that show a stronger placebo effect if things feel more medical, such as making the sugar pills not taste good or the like. This suggests that the belief level can be quite malleable. But this now makes me extremely interested in your hypothesis.
Agreed—I was all set to vote it down, but it’s a clever enough idea that I voted it up.