I write quite a bit about placebo effects. Of course, part of the reason is that placebo effects are just plain interesting from a scientific perspective. After all, if one can relieve symptoms with inert sugar pills or other ineffective interventions because of the power of expectation, that’s something we should want to understand. Also, given the mission of this blog, another major reason is that placebo effects are inextricably bound to the question of whether the alternative medicine modalities that are being “integrated” into medicine through the brand of integrative medicine actually have any useful therapeutic effects or not, aside from placebo effects. Of course, as we’ve discussed time and time again, pretty much all “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative” medicine modalities that are not herbal medicine, nutrition, or exercise (which can have measurable physiological effects due to understandable physical mechanisms) have no detectable effects above and beyond placebo effects, no matter how much proponents of integrative medicine try to show that they do. There’s a reason why, given the utter implausibility of many of these treatments, such as homeopathy, reiki, and the like, I refer to integrative medicine as “integrating” quackery with real medicine; that is, when integrative medicine is not rebranding perfectly respectable science-based modalities like diet and exercise as somehow “alternative” or “integrative,” so that they can claim at least some efficacious modalities in their armamentarium and thereby imply that the quackery has value too.
That’s why I was so disturbed when a reader e-mailed me a link to a credulous article in National Geographic that basically promotes every pseudoscientific trope about acupuncture entitled, “Here’s What Placebos Can Heal—And What They Can’t” by Simon Worrall, with the subtitle “The latest research in biochemistry reveals that your brain can actually self-medicate.” Yes, that’s like waving the proverbial cape in front of the proverbial bull, particularly given how ScienceBlogs was for a time in essence owned by National Geographic. The article is an interview with Erik Vance about his new book, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. Its blurb is not encouraging:
This riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains? Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events. Drawing on centuries of research and interviews with leading experts in the field, Vance takes us on a fascinating adventure from Harvard’s research labs to a witch doctor’s office in Catemaco, Mexico, to an alternative medicine school near Beijing (often called “China’s Hogwarts”). Vance’s firsthand dispatches will change the way you think—and feel.
Expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can actively change our bodies and minds. Vance builds a case for our “internal pharmacy”—the very real chemical reactions our brains produce when we think we are experiencing pain or healing, actual or perceived. Supporting this idea is centuries of placebo research in a range of forms, from sugar pills to shock waves; studies of alternative medicine techniques heralded and condemned in different parts of the world (think crystals and chakras); and most recently, major advances in brain mapping technology. Thanks to this technology, we’re learning how we might leverage our suggestibility (or lack thereof) for personalized medicine, and Vance brings us to the front lines of such study.
You know, someone should tell whoever wrote the blurb that being referred to as “Hogwarts” is not a good thing in medicine. Of course, I can’t resist indulging in one of my favorite quips here regarding Hogwarts and alternative medicine: What’s the difference between magic Harry Potter’s world and alternative medicine? In Harry Potter’s world, magic works. Alternative medicine, not so much.
Unfortunately, this article promotes what we at SBM have come to refer to as the “placebo narrative” in apologia for integrative medicine. If what Vance says in his interview reflects what’s in his book (and there’s no reason to think it doesn’t), then the book is basically promoting the same message. Before I look at the interview itself, though, let’s recap what we mean by the “placebo narrative.”
The placebo narrative
I consider it a truism that, as more and more rigorous clinical trials with proper blinding and controls show that popular alternative medicine modalities like acupuncture, reiki, and the like that are furiously being “integrated” into medicine have no detectable specific effects on any disease or condition distinguishable from placebo effects, increasingly integrative medicine proponents have shifted to arguing that that’s OK, that these modalities actually work through the “power of placebo.” Thus was born what Steve Novella has referred to as the “placebo narrative.” I like that term, but I sometimes refer to the placebo narrative as the myth that “thinking makes it so,” which is the basis for the rebranding of integrative medicine as harnessing “the power of placebo” or, alternatively, the power of positive thinking. Never mind that it’s highly questionable whether it’s ever worthwhile to do so and that trying to use placebo effects to intervene in real disease processes could potentially have deadly consequences by making the patient think he feels better without actually affecting the underlying pathology.
That’s not to say that there aren’t still believers out there trying to demonstrate through “bait and switch” studies that, for example, acupuncture is more potent than antidepressants (it’s not); that acupuncture is effective in relieving hot flashes, be they due to menopause or breast cancer chemotherapy or hormonal therapy (no, it doesn’t work for either); or that acupuncture is effective in improving the pregnancy rate in women undergoing in vitro fertilization (it’s not). There are even meta-analyses claiming that acupuncture “works.” One meta-analysis by Andrew Vickers claiming that acupuncture is effective for pain, is cited almost as gospel by acupuncture advocates, even though its methodological deficiencies are significant and the effect “detected” is almost certainly not clinically significant, issues detailed by Steve Novella, Mark Crislip, and, of course, yours truly. (Let’s just say that the corresponding author of that study did not take the criticism well.) I could go on, but you get the idea. In fact, I’d argue that it’s because of how difficult it has been for acupuncture advocates to show that acupuncture and other alternative therapies work for anything that the narrative has shifted to placebos. It’s also why integrative medicine advocates like pragmatic trials so much.
Still, those who still think various highly implausible alternative medicine treatments actually work notwithstanding, increasingly the placebo narrative has become the dominant message among integrative medicine advocates to explain how the woo in integrative medicine “works.” Basically, any time you hear someone referring to the “mind-body” connection, they’re invoking a disguised form of the placebo narrative, wrapped in discredited mind-body dualism to boot.
The problem with the placebo narrative
As you might imagine if you’ve been reading SBM a while, there’s a problem with the placebo narrative—many problems, actually. These fall into two categories, in general: The scientific and the ethical. The ethical problem is easy to understand, and it’s very, very daunting for the promoters of the placebo narrative. Basically, in medicine it is very unethical to lie to patients, and inducing placebo effects requires lying to patients. Period.
That’s why integrative medicine believers have made such an effort to provide evidence that it is not actually necessary to lie to patients to induce placebo effects. The big name in integrative medicine who has done the most to promote this narrative of “placebos without deception” is without a doubt Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard. Indeed, Kaptchuk has tried repeatedly to demonstrate that it is possible to trigger placebo effects “without deception,” and three of his clinical trials are the ones often cited to argue that placebo effects don’t require lying to the patient. Unfortunately, it takes very little in the way of a critical reading of all three studies to realize that there was indeed deception in them, as well as selection bias. The advertising and the consent forms for both trials basically served the purpose of the physician telling a patient that the treatment would work. For instance, in one of Kaptchuk’s studies, which tested placebo pills on patients with irritable bowel syndrome (a syndrome very sensitive to placebo effects) emphasized how “placebo pills, something like sugar pills, have been shown in rigorous clinical testing to produce significant mind-body self-healing processes.” Another of his studies, which tested the drug Maxalt versus placebo pills for their effect on migraine headache symptoms, included in its language about the placebo: “Our second goal is to understand why placebo pills can also make you pain-free.” Not to understand why placebo pills might be able to make you pain-free or could possibly make you pain free. “Can make you pain free.” The other study, billed an open-label placebo trial for chronic low back pain, included this language:
After informed consent, all participants were asked if they had heard of the “placebo effect” and explained in an approximately 15-minute a priori script, adopted from an earlier OLP study, the following “4 discussion points”: (1) the placebo effect can be powerful, (2) the body automatically can respond to taking placebo pills like Pavlov dogs who salivated when they heard a bell, (3) a positive attitude can be helpful but is not necessary, and (4) taking the pills faithfully for the 21 days is critical. All participants were also shown a video clip (1 minute 25 seconds) of a television news report, in which participants in an OLP trial of irritable bowel syndrome were interviewed (excerpted from: http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/40787382#40787382).
So basically, they used the same talking points from the previous study, plus clips from a news reports about happy study participants to prime the patients that placebo effects can be “powerful.” In pretty much every study of “placebo without deception,” you will find a problem like this.
None of this doesn’t mean that the science of placebo effects isn’t worth studying. The problem is that integrative medicine proponents have taken over much of the research and tried to make it conform to their preferred narrative
Enter Erik Vance
When I encountered Worrall’s interview with Vance on NatGeo, I thought Vance’s name sounded vaguely familiar. A quick search revealed him to be a science writer whose work has appeared in Discover and the New York Times. When I saw how much Vance has written about placebo effects before, I was surprised that, as far as I could tell, neither I nor any of the other SBM bloggers had written about one of his articles before, particularly given that he’s written articles like “Power of the Placebo,” complete with a placebo narrative trope, ‘Once dismissed as a curiosity, the placebo effect is now recognized as the key to the brain’s “inner pharmacy.” If only doctors knew how to open the medicine cabinet.’ Is it? Is it really?
In the introduction to the interview, Worrall informs us a bit about Vance, including that he trained as a biologist but had been raised in a Christian Science household. That’s probably why Worrall’s first question was about whether faith healing actually can work, to which Vance answered:
Wow, that’s tough! I was brought up in Christian Science, which, at its heart, believes that the world, including our bodies, is a reflection of our minds. So, if you change your mind, you can change your body.
Growing up in Christian Science I saw a lot of healings, which piqued and sustained my interest in this subject. I saw people who claimed to be healed of cancer, or a guy who cut off his toe and the toe grew back. But my hope for this book is not to prove or disprove these things I saw as a child. Do placebos and the power of the mind work? What I’ve found is yes, but not with everything. There are rules and conditions in which healing can be incredibly effective. Parkinson’s, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, anxiety, certain types of asthma, and autoimmune deficiencies are all very placebo-responsive. But cancer is not.
Christian Science, homeopathy, or other unproven alternative medicines may make someone feel better, but when it comes to curing a life-threatening tumor, that isn’t an appropriate place to be using these methods.
At least Vance isn’t completely unreasonable. At least he attributes some limitations to placebo medicine. (Would that some others were a bit more circumspect!) He’s also not antivaccine, as we learn when he states that his kids have all their shots and how he understands how vaccines work and therefore has full faith in them. In fact, part of the problem with the placebo narrative is how it’s taken in people who believe themselves to be scientific and who are generally pretty reasonable.
Vance is, however, dead wrong about asthma being particularly placebo-responsive—and my choice of the word “dead” is intentional because placebo medicine could easily lead to the death of asthmatic patients. Indeed it’s worth expanding a bit on a point to state that one of Kaptchuk’s own studies showed just how dangerous using placebo effects in asthma is. The CliffsNotes version is that placebos made asthma patients undergoing an asthma attack feel as though they were breathing better, but the cold, hard evidence from incentive spirometry showed that their breathing function did not improve. As Peter Lipson pointed out, that’s a good way to kill a patient, because that patient could feel less short of breath even though he is on the verge of respiratory collapse.
Vance is not incorrect when he discusses how placebo effects impact Parkinson’s disease:
Parkinson’s is the perfect disease to talk about placebos. It is a chronic deficiency of dopamine, which is one of those brain chemicals that does a lot of jobs in our bodies. One of [dopamine’s] important roles is in reward processing: how we think about good things we might get in the future.
Expectation drives placebos. And dopamine is a chemical that’s very responsive to our expectations. Parkinson’s happens to be a deficiency in the very chemical that’s very important in placebo effects and rewards.
If you look at Alzheimer’s, which does not have a high placebo response, you start to see that there are rules at play when it comes to placebos. It’s not your brain magically doing all these crazy things. There are certain chemicals we have access to and others we don’t.
It is true that clinical trials of Parkinson’s disease do report significant placebo effects. For example, Dr. Christopher Goetz examined 11 clinical trials with 858 patients and found that in drug trials 0-27% of patients experienced improvement in their symptomatology, while in surgical trials the number could be as high as 42%. (More invasive placebos produce more significant placebo effects.) Overall, 16% of patients in the placebo groups of the trials experienced improvement. Of course, I would point out that most patients with a serious disease would not be particularly happy to have only a 16% chance of improving due to a treatment. Yes, there are pharmaceuticals that are that poorly effective, usually against bad diseases, but those are exactly the drugs that integrative medicine proponents often rail against—with some justification. Yet here, Vance likes an intervention that produces such a modest result.
He also doesn’t consider that even that modest result is probably illusory.
The illusion of placebo effects
One thing not mentioned here is that placebo effects can only be quantified in clinical trials, which are, by their nature, highly artificial treatment situations. We at SBM often point out that it’s incorrect to refer to “the placebo effect,” because there is not just one placebo effect. Instead, we refer to placebo effects. Much of what is lumped together as “the placebo effect” include study artifacts that have little or no bearing on real world outcomes and/or modulation of the patient’s perception of his symptoms. Indeed, there are those who question, based on evidence, whether there is even such a thing as placebo effects. For example, in 2001 Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche published an article in which they asked whether the placebo was powerless based on 214 studies with a total of 8,525 patients in which they concluded:
We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects. Although placebos had no significant effects on objective or binary outcomes, they had possible small benefits in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain. Outside the setting of clinical trials, there is no justification for the use of placebos.
In support of the idea that much of what passes for “placebo effects” is in reality a sum of artifacts of clinical trials, Jean Brissonnet in a French language article translated by Harriet Hall pointed out that clinical trials are different. We measure many more things—and measure them more intensively. Treatments are much more standardized. Brissonnet proposes defining the placebo effect thusly, “Observed effect = specific effect + natural course of healing + a residual effect that we will provisionally call the placebo effect.”
When you look at placebo effects this way, they become a lot less impressive than proponents like Vance portray them. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to go as far as Mark Crislip in rejecting the idea that placebo effects are even a real thing, but I have been convinced that, if placebo effects are real apart from artifacts in clinical trial construction, measurement biases, and the like, they are quite modest at best and, in the case of alternative medicine, not worth lying to the patient.
None of this is to say that placebo effects might not be useful, because it is certainly possible that doctors can enhance the perceived effectiveness of evidence- and science-based treatment by using strategies that enhance placebo effects, in particular the doctor-patient relationship. One of my favorite studies was another Kaptchuk study that actually told us something interesting about placebos. Basically, Kaptchuk randomized patients with irritable bowel disease into three groups. Subjects in Group 1 were in the wait list control and received no intervention. Subjects in Group 2 received placebo acupuncture treatments from an acupuncturist showing no empathy. Subjects in Group 3 received the same acupuncture treatments as patients in group 2 under the same conditions and in the same room, except that the practitioners interacted with them extensively. The difference was that subjects experienced an “augmented” patient interaction (45 minutes) at the first visit in which detailed questions about their symptoms were asked, including how their IBS symptoms affected their lifestyles and relationships. The interviewers asked if subjects understood the “cause” and “meaning” of their conditions and at each visit incorporated at least five primary behaviors, including a warm, friendly manner; active listening (repeating the patient’s words and asking for clarifications); empathy; 20 seconds of thoughtful silence while feeling the patient’s pulse or contemplating a treatment plan; and communication of confidence and positive expectation. At each visit, the acupuncturist would place the placebo needles and then leave the subject in a quiet room for 20 minutes. When the practitioner came back to remove the needles, he or she also made sure to exchange some words of encouragement.
The results? At the end of six weeks, Kaptchuk observed an improvement of 28%, 44%, and 62% in groups 1, 2, and 3, respectively, concluding, “Non-specific effects can produce statistically and clinically significant outcomes and the patient-practitioner relationship is the most robust component.” Basically, what we used to call a good bedside manner matters.
Even Vance seems to realize that the trappings of medicine and the practitioner-patient relationship are very important, as he says:
I also traveled to Catemaco, a town in Vera Cruz famous for its witch doctors. I met with one of the leading witch doctors there to try and understand what we call the theater of medicine—all the trappings that go into the healing practice, like the stethoscope and white lab coat. In different cultural contexts, those things change. What was interesting in Catemaco is that many of the traditional healers have adopted the theater of modern medicine. They wear lab coats, cut their hair short, and use long words, which gives them the “flavor” of what we recognize as conventional medicine.
And:
The message for doctors is the importance of being more empathetic and taking more time. You may be throwing away 30 percent of your cure just by having a poor bedside manner. If you do, you can’t be surprised if people go looking for other means of healing. The witch doctors, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, and homeopaths I spoke to all understand this.
Of course, the proper response to this is to point out that, yes, bedside manner matters. That’s why training physicians to be more empathetic is a far better course than to embrace witchcraft like homeopathy, acupuncture, and other forms of magic that make up much of the alternative medicine being “integrated” into medicine through integrative medicine.
The seductiveness of the placebo narrative
Paul Ingraham summed up placebo effects well:
Placebo gets more love than it deserves. I am interested in the biology and psychology of placebo, but it is not a magical mind-over-matter phenomenon, or even a good consolation prize when treatment is otherwise ineffective. Many medical problems are entirely immune to positive thinking and expectation (try treating tuberculosis with a sugar pill and see how many Nobel Prizes you pick up for that innovation). The power of belief is strictly limited and accounts for only some of what we think of as “the” placebo effect. There are no mentally-mediated healing miracles. But there is an awful lot of ideologically motivated hype about placebo…
There’s a reason for this hype, though. The placebo narrative is very seductive, as I’ve pointed out many times before, for reasons that are not hard to guess. First and foremost, it taps into a deep, longstanding aspect of humans. Specifically, the placebo narrative offers the patient—and, truth be told, the physician as well—an illusion of control. What is the reward for the physician? That’s simple. These days medicine is a collaboration between doctor and patient, and, although the doctor still holds most of the power, the patient must be involved in the decision-making process. However, part of the appeal of being a physician is actually rooted in paternalism (these days, disguised under the term “patient-centered care,” where we are the nearly all-knowing physician who does what is necessary to heal the sick and the patient simply accepts whatever we deem necessary. We don’t have to tell them everything, and they don’t expect to be told everything. There is also a very real appeal to being a “shaman-healer,” who takes care of the “whole patient” spiritually as well as physically. Being able to perceive oneself as teaching a patient to “heal himself” could thus be very tempting, and there’s a reason why anthropologists are attracted to alternative medicine.
As for patients, placebo medicine literally tells them that their mind—and therefore they—can relieve their symptoms and “heal” their bodies just by unleashing some innate power within oneself to heal the body. You don’t have to have chronic pain or a serious illness to understand how appealing such an idea is. Patients love it, for much the same way that people love The Secret. It tells you that you attract what you want to yourself and that, basically, if you only want something bad enough, including healing, the universe will provide.
It’s not for nothing that I coined the term “the central dogma of alternative medicine” and concluded that that central dogma is: Wishing makes it so. The placebo narrative fits perfectly with that and is of a piece with previous religious healing traditions in which the ill pray for healing and, if that healing comes, God did it. The main difference here is that we’re told that, instead of the universe providing through a god or spirit, the universe provides through your mind—as though the mind and the body were separate things.
The reality of course, is much more prosaic and much less “sexy,” as even Vance seems to realize. Late in the interview he notes that he’s “tried a lot of alternative medicines and haven’t stuck with any of them.” Why not? If placebo effects are so powerful, you’d think Vance would have found an alternative medicine modality that he liked enough to stick with.
He also cautions:
The message for the patient is that [alternative medicine] can be effective. But I do lay out some rules for when to do it and when not to.
One is, don’t hurt yourself. If you have a life-threatening disease, that’s not the time to play with expectations.
Don’t go broke. I’ve talked to many people who’ve spent their life’s fortune chasing after healings that were never going to happen.
The last one is, don’t harm the environment. If your placebo involves endangered animals, it might be a good idea to pick a different one.
Within those rules and within certain diseases, there’s a lot you can do. Just because it’s a placebo doesn’t mean it won’t work. This has been shown again and again in laboratories.
Except that it hasn’t “been shown again and again in laboratories” that placebos “work.” It’s still not even clear that placebo effects are anything but artifacts of clinical trials. In brief, the myth of placebo effects is far more impressive than the reality.
Placebo research can be valuable, but it has, unfortunately, been largely hijacked by integrative medicine, whose adherents want to demonstrate that alternative medicine works and that placebo medicine is efficacious and therefore worthwhile. (Would that it were true!) What placebo research has shown us is not that alternative medicine works, nor has it shown us that the brain is the body’s “pharmacy” that can be tapped at will to heal all manner of ailments. Rather, what it has done is to reinforce something known since ancient times, the importance of empathy and a trusting practitioner-patient relationship. That’s more than good enough.
29 replies on “The placebo narrative: Justifying integrative medicine through exaggeration”
How would the effects of something like Rescue Remedy be explained in terms of its effect on anxiety. I came up against this the other day and found myself a bit tonge tied trying to explain to a friend why it was just a placebo. She said she didn’t care because it “worked” (she was very anxious, used the stuff and very quickly felt much better). I have read this, and all the highlighted bits, and I still don’t see how to answer my friend. What’s wrong with the “power of suggestion”, “power of positive thinking” with something like anxiety? It certainly shouldn’t cost $12 or more per bottle, but that argument doesn’t work very well either. Of course she threw out the naturalistic fallacy as well, at which point I kinda gave up. I need something simple and to the point to someone who barely got through high school and doesn’t read (probably barely can). Why bother? It just bugs me to hear that, “oh, you know that stuff I got? It really works!”. It seems like a gateway drug.
“It certainly shouldn’t cost $12 or more per bottle”
Yes it should, and even much more. The amount a person spends on something the more they are personally invested in it working (filling a need or a want). The same is true of cars, clothes, house, phone, personal trainer, or whatever. The more they spend the more they will strive to convince you, and themselves, that it works and was therefore worth the price.
I was given a bottle by a friend. Consuming the entire thing worked for a little while, but it’s awfully expensive for a digestif.
Real prescription medications usually do cost $12 or more per bottle–they need to set a higher price to recover manufacturing costs, amortized R&D costs, distribution costs, and reasonable retail markup. Some drug manufacturers get greedy and charge far more than justified by their costs, but even the ones that don’t generally end up charging more. Of course the insured patient rarely sees that full cost because their cost is limited to the co-payment while the insurance company covers the difference.
OTC medications are a different story. Volume and competition help to drive prices down. But I recall from the time I almost bought a homeopathic remedy by mistake (N=1) that the homeopathic remedy was triple the price of the real stuff, and that was for the store brand homeopathic remedy (there was also a name brand version of the homeopathic remedy for about twice the price of the store brand).
I don’t think rs@2 is entirely wrong about people equating higher price with superior product. That certainly does happen, whether justified (e.g., in real estate you are almost always getting something for the additional money you pay, whether it’s a bigger lot, more square footage, or a more desirable location) or not (e.g., I can’t reliably distinguish a $20/bottle wine from a $2k/bottle wine, but many wine snobs will always take the latter if they can afford it). I don’t think that’s necessarily the case with placebo medicine. There are lots of folk remedies that qualify as placebo medicine that don’t cost a bundle of money, e.g., chicken soup for relief of cold symptoms. Some people get desperate enough to pay lots of money for treatments, and certainly there are charlatans who take advantage of this, but it’s not the whole story.
The price should have an impact on the placebo effect. If an injection has more effect than two pills and two pills has more effect than one pill then it makes a kinda sense that an expensive remedy has more effect than a cheap one. Can you tell I’ve just been rereading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science?
Everything we pay for in life is worth only what we’re willing to spend on it. Fake products can cost what they do because the people who are willing to buy them are willing to pay it. If they think they are getting value for their money, then the value is there to them . . . until their kid dies from an untreated infection, or they have a stroke because the “natural” remedy for their high blood pressure didn’t do them a damn bit of good.
There’s a reason why snake oil salesmen did so well 100+ years ago. Partly because anyone really sick would be dead by the time they came through town again, and partly because their products contained something else that created the illusion of feeling better that worked long enough that a change for the worse wasn’t attributed to the snake oil, but the fact they’d run out of it and the salesman had moved on to the next town of marks.
Funny how the snake oil of the day contained a lot of alcohol and/or laudanum or cocaine.
Which makes me want to know what was really in the placebo that darwinslapdog’s friend takes, Rescue Remedy. It didn’t take long to find that brandy is one of the ingredients.
Go figure. Placebo effect my ass. She’s getting a buzz. Probably not enough to get her pulled over or get her a DUI, unless she gets a drink after work with her friends.
Many years ago I started taking the much-maligned fluoxetine. I started feeling better in a couple of days. I knew perfectly well that it was extremely unlikely that it was actually doing anything yet, and suspect that I felt better in large part because I’d finally come to the point of giving myself permission to feel better.
I really doubt that darwinslapdog’s friend was getting a buzz – the standard product contains “27% Grape Based Brandy as a preservative” and a standard bottle of drops is only 20 mL, so 5.4 mL of ethanol in a whole bottle. For comparison, a UK “unit” of alcohol is 10 mL or 8 g, equivalent to 25 ml of typical 40%-alcohol hard liquor. A typical “shot” in Canada or the US is about 43 mL, containing about 17 mL of alcohol.
Oh, Jebus, Doctors Phil & Oz recommend Rescue Remedy, according the mfr’s web site.
Isn’t rescue remedy supposed to be delivered in a small cask attached to the collar of a St. Bernard?
***
Here’s a link to an old photo of placebo bottles. I ran across it early this morning while trying to find out about the rise and fall of “hypodermic tablets”, which came up in a conversation last evening.
I had a similar experience when I first started on Celexa during my first year of grad school, when I finally had healthcare; I figure the mere act of finally seeking help probably provided some relief. Or it could have kicked off some hypomania that helped me get through my second semester of grad school without throwing me totally off kilter, who knows. I was on a variety of antidepressants for years, on again off again. Wellbutrin definitely made me unbalanced and I went off it after a few weeks.
I once bought a bottle of homeopathic cough syrup by accident. It helped, but I suspect it was the contents of the syrup itself, not the magical mystical whatever-it-is that’s not even in there.
Eric Lund: Chicken soup for a cold is not a placebo. The hot liquid helps to clear the nasal passages. In addition, some research suggests that something in chicken soup may have properties beyond just being a hot liquid: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/the-science-of-chicken-soup/?_r=0
doug: As to amounts of alcohol imbibed from a patent medicine, some people are acutely sensitive to alcohol. My wife gets loopy on a sip of wine or about one ounce of beer. This is most certainly not any kind of anticipation effect. Besides, many people taking these “harmless” remedies figure that more is better and take lots more than the recommended dose.
doug: from the manufacturer’s FAQ: http://feelbach.com/faq.asp?qid=5344790&act=bq
They have several products with varying levels of alcohol “as a preservative.”
1) “We preserve the essence in Brandy and spring water, wherein the alcohol level per volume is 25%.” That’s 50 proof.
2) “In addition, we sell ready-mixed essences (Bach flower formulas). These essences are intended for common situations such as insomnia, tension, and smoking cessation. These essences are sold in 20 ml bottles. We preserve these essences with Brandy at an alcohol level of 40% per volume, and they retain their potency for 10 years.” That’s 80 proof. No doubt it lasts ten years. I want to know if it ages well, like a good whiskey.
3) “Lastly, we sell each of the 38 basic Bach essences in 20 ml bottles. These too are preserved in Brandy at an alcohol level of 40% per volume, and are also potent for 10 years.” That’s also 80 proof.
Now granted, they instruct you to further dilute in water. Still, I’d be interested to know what it does to the BAC. And we all know that patient who thinks if a little is good, more is better, as Dave also pointed out.
I scare the socks off people with tales of people routinely taking 5 or more tablets of Vicodin at a time because they’re so addicted to hydrocodone, and wondering why their livers are failing.
I also wonder if they have to have a liquor license to ship interstate. Hope they’re not selling to minors.
I take it that you missed this story.
You can even get your dog drunk on homeopathic remedies!
Narad: I did miss that story.
What does it say that my first reaction was, “Holy shit!” 😀
@NumberWang #5
I also enjoyed Bad Science and some of Ben Goldacre’s other work, but I have noticed a bit of pushback against some of his comments on placebos.
For example, I recently listened to a podcast from Merseyside Skeptics Society where they went through some of the studies he was quoting and argued that they didn’t necessarily show what Ben was claiming they did: that the ‘placebo’ response due to the variations in specific placebo treatment (number of pills etc.) could not fully be untangled from other non-specific effects.
IIRC, one of the issues mentioned was that the comparisons of different placebos against each other were partly based on comparing placebo arms of two different studies with each other, so that as well as comparing two different placebo treatments, it was effectively a comparison of two different groups of patients and two different groups of ‘testers’. Hence maybe the difference in response was partly down to different biases in the testers or different makeup of the treatment groups etc.
[…] a week ago from my not-so-super-secret other blog. This time around, it just so happened to be a post about what I like to refer to as the placebo narrative. As is my wont, I described in the usual ridiculous level of detail why that narrative is so […]
Well I can’t claim to know if BG looked at those studies in depth but I’m fairly sure he would be delighted to know that they were being questioned.
Check out the podcast themselves, it’s number 187 and 188 of skeptics with a K:
http://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/podcasts/
One of the studies was painkillers in brand packaging versus generic.
The 4 arms was placebe in generic packaging, placebo in brand packaging, and painkillers in generic and brand packaging.
In the placebo arms the brand packaging had better effect, and in the drug arms the brand had better effects, however, the placebo branded effect was less than the drug generic effect, and the scale was curios, a 1 to 6 with 1 worse, 2 the same, 3 slightly better 4 a Little better, 5 better and 6 much better, with the placebos fooling around between 2 and 3.
The point was that the study did not look at placebo versus drug interactions, as BG claimed, it did not test or show that placebo was on par with drugs.
They argued that BG must have misremembered the study, especially since he attributed a different drug to the test, than the one that was used.
I think the conclusion was that the placebo narrative is a powerful one, and that BG had fallen for it, at least partly.
The part of the book I’m remembering mentioned nothing about testing against drugs. Just one placebo compared to another. Specifically that the more serious the intervention is considered, the greater the effect.
I do wonder about ginger for motion sickness and the placebo affect. Here’s how the train of thought usually goes:
This is probably just a placebo.
Then it won’t work because I know it’s a placebo.
But maybe you’ve built a conditioned response to feel better.
And there is a little bit of research that says it might work.
Look, it will either help, do nothing, or maybe make you hurl and you’ll feel better. Eat it!
*eats ginger candy*
It BURNS!
Oh, well, maybe it works by overwhelming your brain with pain so you can’t feel anything else?
*suffers*
In Nepal they have a ‘sweet’ that I was given for anti nausea. Some kind of concentrated salty….lemony….something. Tasted foul but it really did the job. I thought it was medicine until they gave me an entire jar to bring back to the UK. No idea what category that would fit in to. Herbal? Placebo? Maybe the strong taste just distracted me from the feeling I wanted to puke.
NumberWang@20: My mom told me that the old-time remedy for nausea was straight Coke syrup. And the one time I tried an OTC anti-nausea syrup it was the same thing: unspeakably sweet (and totally ineffective, as the taste/texture made me gag and then, well).
I’ve wondered how that’s supposed to work, being so sweet. Some hydroscopic property? (i’m pretty sure that’s how couch syrups work, just by mechanically coating to sooth.)
Blast & darnnation! I went to the yeast pee dispensary this evening and forgot to have a look for green Chartreuse. If a few flowers in some 25-40% ethanol can “rescue” and calm the anxious, Chartreuse ought to resurrect the dead and make methamphetamine with a dash of strychnine seem like a sedative by comparison. I don’t think I’ve had any (Chartreuse, that is) this millennium. I hate to think what the price is these days.
On straight Coke syrup – I presume the syrup doesn’t contain the phosphoric acid. If it did it would make a bit of a twist on the first part of
Through the teeth,
Over the gums,
Look out stomach,
Here it comes.
Was Coke syrup actually sold at retail in the past?
“… mechanically coating to sooth”
Forsooth! They gave Grandpa Joad “soothing syrup”. I thought it was probably just heavy on the EtOH, but Wikipedia says morphine!
Ballad of Tom Joad by Woodie Guthrie
Justatech: Oh dear. I just bought my sister in law a few ounces of ginger tea for Christmas, as she’s having a terrible time with nausea and doesn’t have many herbal teas. (She’s trying to cut down on caffeine due to pregnancy). Maybe I should have saved my money.
I am disappointed.
Much ado about cost (everyone knows all that and I was talking more about the profit to the quacks, not people’s attitudes) and little about the rest. My friend is a functioning alcoholic who consumes large quantities every day, so I don’t think it was the bit in the few drops she consumed. Her testimony was dramatic and she was very distressed that I tried to debunk her “miracle”. I am always conflicted about pipiing up when people testify to woo, especially as it usually does no good anyway, but my sceptical side just can’t be kept in check.
Coca Cola and Coke syrup are well-known folk remedies for nausea and to my anecdotal experience work pretty well. The syrup does contain phosphoric acid, and it’s worth noting that Emetrol, an OTC anti-emetic, has phosphoric acid and sugar as it’s active ingredients. Coke is cheaper.
As for ginger, it’s a common home remedy for a number of things in the Far East. My wife, a nurse from the Philippines, slices ginger root in the soft rice she cooks up when someone at home has diarrhea or nausea. It does help, although that may be due to the rice itself, or the salt in it, or the soothing feeling of having something hot and digestible in the stomach.
She also swears by ginger root for coughing. She will give it in tea or or just a sliver of the raw root, and it seems to help. I know this is all anecdotal, but when she gives me something with ginger it’s been harmless at worst.
PGP @24: No, no, you’re good! I’m pretty sure (if I’m remembering the things I found on PubMed correctly) that ginger has been found to be more effective than placebo for morning sickness. And at least it’s a clear fluid so it’s no *hurting*.
@ JP, doug, and anyone else who’s ever been prescribed an anti-depressant…
Granted that you’re just talking about feeling better after a couple days, which would be ‘placebo’ not effect of the drug itself, there are a lot of folks who think all common anti-depressants have no effect beyond placebo and point to some research that supposedly supports that conclusion.
I don’t buy that at all. In my travels through depression-land, I was prescribed Zoloft, Paxil, Effexor, Serzone, Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, Celexa, and Lexapro at different times, most during a fairly short period when I wasn’t responding well to medication. I had heard of Prozac, of course, and had been on desipramine during an earlier really bad spell, so I had a general expectation that anti-depressant would do something – not make me feel ‘good’ in any way, but keep the depressive downward spirals from sinking past a certain point, acting something like a peak limiter in electronics or a drive-train governor in a truck. Though my expectations and my mental state were essentially constant, the anti-depressant effect, or lack thereof, was all over the place from one pill to another that were all supposed to be similar in action, and some (most notably Celexa vs. Lexapro) that had very similar chemical composition.
For one thing, I wouldn’t call SSRIs ‘placebos’, since they all had fairly unpleasant ‘side effects’. They were all definitely doing something, of course, how that affected my mental state I can’t say. In listening to other depressives, I’d say the anecdotal reports are pretty much univocal in describing prescription of anti-depressants as a blindfolded psydoc tossing darts in the general direction of a wall until one of them sticks in the target. That is, they couldn’t find any rhyme or reason to what ‘worked’ or what didn’t any more than I could. Nor was there any pattern across this unscientifc sample. The ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ all seemed idiosyncratic and individualized.
This experience is one reason I wish there was more good research into ‘placebo effects’, including those that accompany meds that do have some physiological mechanism of action. For example, how might my little survey square with the resaerch casting doubt that SSRIs do anything at all. I suspect there may be the usual methodological flaws in studies that try to quantify some form of self-reports. But beyond that, I wonder if any study across a representative sample population could account for the sort of dartboard/it-all-depends-on-the-individual hypotheses, or whether somehow these specific differential effects disappear when you examine the aggregate…
In the UK, ‘Integrated’ healthcare generally means the integration of primary, secondary, tertiary and social care – not the integration of cow pie and apple pie (nonsense/scientific sense) as in the US.
The term ‘Integrative medicine’ is only slowly being applied in the UK – and is not understood by most doctors, medical institutions and patients, even though our Prince of Wales did found his ‘Foundation for Integrated Health’ some years ago (meaning cow/apple pie integration). It went bust!
For that reason I am happy with the ‘placebo narrative’ which I find helpful to explain to anyone who will listen how it is that so many patients report ‘benefit’ from CAM (which I term ‘camistry’).
It is not good enough to say a CAM ‘doesn’t work’ without differentiating the type I effects of a constructive therapeutic relationship with an empathic practitioner from the type II effects of the specific modality (the pill, prick, pummel, potion, what have you.) Camistry provides no type II effects – or it would be ‘medicine’.
But I cannot differentiate the response expectancies achieved by placebos from those achieved by hypnosis. And since all hypnosis is auto-hypnosis (even if facilitated), are not placebo effects a manifestation of hypnotic effects (and thereby, purely imaginary)?
I try to explore this theme more in ‘Real Secrets of Alternative Medicine (Amazon).