Tag: placebo
Placebos in the news again
Towards the end of last week, I was contemplating what I would be writing about for Monday. No topic had quite floated my boat, but I hated to dip into the archive of topics I’ve written about before to update a post. After all, I like to be topical whenever possible. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear (yes, I know...
Puncturing the Acupuncture Myth
Note: This is slightly revised from an article I originally wrote as a “SkepDoc” column for Skeptic magazine. It was pre-released online in eSkeptic and it has already generated a lot of comments, including “a truly amazing piece of peurile pseudo-intellectualism,” “an ad hominem attack on one form of alternative medicine so beset by poor thinking that one must come to the...
Sterile Water Injections for Pain Relief
Before ethical standards changed, doctors used to occasionally fool patients with placebo injections of sterile saline or water. If my obstetrician had tried to give me sterile water instead of an epidural, I probably would have hit him. But apparently women are getting sterile water injections for childbirth and are telling us they work. What’s going on? A recent study in Sweden...
The Placebo Myth
King Arthur: Now stand aside, worthy adversary. Black Knight: ‘Tis but a scratch. King Arthur: A scratch? Your arm’s off. Black Knight: No it isn’t. King Arthur: What’s that, then? Black Knight: [after a pause] I’ve had worse. King Arthur: You liar. Black Knight: Come on ya pansy.King Arthur: [after Arthur’s cut off both of the Black Knight’s arms] Look, you stupid...
Homeopathy and Evidence-Based Medicine: Back to the Future Part V
Homeopathy and Science: Discussion, Summary and Conclusions I was not surprised by a couple of the dissenting comments after Part IV of this blog. One writer worried that I had neglected, presumably for nefarious reasons, to cite replications of Benveniste’s results; another cited several examples of “positive” homeopathy studies that I had failed to mention. I answered some of those points here....
Snake Oil Science
For my first blog entry, I wanted to write about something important, and I couldn’t think of anything more important than a recent book by R. Barker Bausell: Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine. If you want to understand how medical research works, if you want to know what can lead patients and scientists to false conclusions, if...