Well, here are the thoughts that you provoked from me about this.
Here is the topic for discussion: should we trust psychiatric analysis using frequentist statistics and ignore the outliers, or should we individually analyze psychiatric studies to see if they contain outliers who show symptoms which we personally desire? Should we act differently when seeking nootropics to improve performance than we do when seeking medication for crippling OCD? Should we trust our psychiatrists, who are probably not very statistically savvy and probably don’t read the cases of the outliers?
I think we may want to split this up into two questions: What you should do personally, if you feel you have condition X, and what you should do as a government if you want to help treatment for condition X.
For instance, as a government, I would go for repeatability, and size. Just forget the idea of trusting or not trusting suggestive outliers and go for more verification, with a larger sample: If for no other reason then determining the frequency of the outlying effect, which would be important for making large scale medical recommendations.
However, a single person can’t generally commission large medical studies, so they might want to just read through the literature and read multiple papers about the effects of such things, perhaps also cross referencing their own medical history. I think Metamed, which was mentioned on Less Wrong a while back, does something like this, if you don’t have the time to analyze your health that carefully personally.
If you don’t want to do that, (either independently or through commissioning experts), then chances are you will be relying on:
I think that if even the right placebo could cause changes which improve my effectiveness, it would be worth a shot.
Now, psychiatric placebos can be shown to have a variety of effects in papers, and it can get hammed up a bit in headline rereporting.
Interesting addition of the government perspective. I think that my contributions to that perspective have very little potential for value-added, as that perspective seems to be prevalent in academia and the private and public sectors. I am taking the individual perspective for this discussion.
I would also be interested in a Metamed opinion on this topic, as you are correct, it seems like the magnified version of what I’m suggesting. I’m basically asking ‘should you hire metamed to prescribe you off-label nootropics based on existing studies?’
If you’re focusing on nootropics specifically, I don’t actually have enough background information about Metamed or nootropics to answer with any degree of confidence.
Their website at https://www.metamed.com/ does allow for a variety of easy contact methods: Any information you got directly from them about the benefits and prices of their service would probably be more accurate than a summary you got from me.
But here is some further discussion about it as well:
Well, here are the thoughts that you provoked from me about this.
I think we may want to split this up into two questions: What you should do personally, if you feel you have condition X, and what you should do as a government if you want to help treatment for condition X.
For instance, as a government, I would go for repeatability, and size. Just forget the idea of trusting or not trusting suggestive outliers and go for more verification, with a larger sample: If for no other reason then determining the frequency of the outlying effect, which would be important for making large scale medical recommendations.
However, a single person can’t generally commission large medical studies, so they might want to just read through the literature and read multiple papers about the effects of such things, perhaps also cross referencing their own medical history. I think Metamed, which was mentioned on Less Wrong a while back, does something like this, if you don’t have the time to analyze your health that carefully personally.
If you don’t want to do that, (either independently or through commissioning experts), then chances are you will be relying on:
Now, psychiatric placebos can be shown to have a variety of effects in papers, and it can get hammed up a bit in headline rereporting.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/01/study-placebo-sleep-just-as-good-as-real-sleep.html
But it isn’t all hammed up either: it gets rather complicated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo
(As a side note, I upvoted you, since that was a good way of provoking thoughts, and it seemed like a placebo for increasing your mental wellbeing.)
Interesting addition of the government perspective. I think that my contributions to that perspective have very little potential for value-added, as that perspective seems to be prevalent in academia and the private and public sectors. I am taking the individual perspective for this discussion.
I would also be interested in a Metamed opinion on this topic, as you are correct, it seems like the magnified version of what I’m suggesting. I’m basically asking ‘should you hire metamed to prescribe you off-label nootropics based on existing studies?’
If you’re focusing on nootropics specifically, I don’t actually have enough background information about Metamed or nootropics to answer with any degree of confidence.
Their website at https://www.metamed.com/ does allow for a variety of easy contact methods: Any information you got directly from them about the benefits and prices of their service would probably be more accurate than a summary you got from me.
But here is some further discussion about it as well:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/03/rah-second-opinions.html
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/03/sarah-constantin-replies-on-metamed.html