Summary of the summary: With three treatment groups, the outcomes for the Active group exceed those taking a sugar pill, which, in turn, exceed those not getting anything. Some studies have even shown that bringing people in, telling them that you are giving them a sugar pill with no medicine, and comparing them to a second group that doesn’t get the completely non active pill, the group that is not getting any medicine, but is doing something medicine-adjacent (swallowing a pill) has p<.05 significantly better outcomes.
I don’t know what “self-heal” means in your comment. Does that include conditions that go away on their own (episode of acute back pain, say)? In which case, wouldn’t it make more sense to call those temporary conditions, rather than conditions which require the intervention of some self-healing mechanism?
The only thing the open-label placebo effect tends to prove, to me, is that the placebo effect is operating at a mind-level much deeper than our rationality efforts can hope to reach.
“Self-heal” just means the condition was not healed by the intervention of the study. For all we know, the patient took some other drug on their own and that cured things.
There have been quite a few studies that show that people can self-heal in remarkable ways.
Summary article: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437#what-is-the-placebo-effect
Summary of the summary: With three treatment groups, the outcomes for the Active group exceed those taking a sugar pill, which, in turn, exceed those not getting anything. Some studies have even shown that bringing people in, telling them that you are giving them a sugar pill with no medicine, and comparing them to a second group that doesn’t get the completely non active pill, the group that is not getting any medicine, but is doing something medicine-adjacent (swallowing a pill) has p<.05 significantly better outcomes.
I don’t know what “self-heal” means in your comment. Does that include conditions that go away on their own (episode of acute back pain, say)? In which case, wouldn’t it make more sense to call those temporary conditions, rather than conditions which require the intervention of some self-healing mechanism?
The only thing the open-label placebo effect tends to prove, to me, is that the placebo effect is operating at a mind-level much deeper than our rationality efforts can hope to reach.
“Self-heal” just means the condition was not healed by the intervention of the study. For all we know, the patient took some other drug on their own and that cured things.