Professor Fabrizio Benedetti is the most famous and almost certainly also the most influential researcher investigating the physiology of placebo effects. In a recent commentary, he asks whether placebo research is fueling quackery, as quacks co-opt its results. The answer to that question is certainly yes. A better question is: How do supporters of science counter the placebo narrative promoted by quacks, in which placebos represent the “power of the mind to heal the body”?
Tag: placebo
Is there such a thing as the “placebome”?
As results from randomized clinical trials show that alternative medicine is nothing more than placeboe, quacks like to argue that they are "harnessing the power of placebo" with their methods and that placebos have real healing effect. They've even gone so far as to make up a genomics-based concept: The placebome. But is there such a thing as the placebome?
An unholy combination of methodolatry and quackery apologia—with jade eggs
Meet Dr. Jason Fung. Dr. Fung is unhappy with skeptics and thinks they're hypocrites behaving like religious fanatics. Unfortunately for him, his arguments are a combination of the worst methodolatry of evidence-based medicine combined with rants against conventional medicine and a defense of quackery.
Does thinking make it so? The placebo myth rears its ugly head again.
Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes the coincidence involved is epic. For instance, as I do on many Mondays, yesterday I crossposted a modified and updated version of a post from 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 popular among promoters of pseudoscientific medical treatments and, more importantly, why that narrative is approaches black hole density bullshit. It’s something …
The placebo narrative: Justifying integrative medicine through exaggeration
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, …
The revenge of the son of the myth of "placebos without deception"
Back when advocates of “alternative” medicine were busily trying to legitimize their quackery by first renaming it “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), long before CAM “evolved” into “integrative medicine,” they really believed that if their favorite woo were to be studied scientifically it would be shown to be efficacious. Thus was born the Office of Alternative Medicine in the NIH, which later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which more recently became the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), thus utterly purging itself of the word “alternative.” Both reflecting and influenced by NCCIH, over …
NCCIH research: Nothing much there behind the curtain
It’s an understatement to say that I’m not exactly a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), the institute formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and, even a year after its name change, probably still better known by its old moniker. Just type “NCCAM” or “NCCIH” into the search box of this blog if you don’t believe me. Basically, it’s an institution forced upon the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), a woo-friendly senator who believed that bee pollen cured his allergies and a …
Psychological correlates of the placebo that is acupuncture
If there’s one thing that’s become clear to me over the years about acupuncture, it’s that it’s nothing more than a theatrical placebo. Many are the times that I’ve asked: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Most recently, I asked this question in 2012. What science-based medicine answers is yes. However, there’s a large contingent of physicians under the sway of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) who have fallen under the spell of that theatrical placebo, leading to a whole subdiscipline of quackademic medicine in which tooth fairy science is used …
Adventures in bad veterinary medicine reported by the local media, year end edition
Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I’ve noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I’m not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience and quackery are so poorly done that I find it hard to believe that even believers find them interesting. For example, back in 2008, I discussed a particularly dumb story aired by our local NBC affiliate WDIV entitled Orbs: Myth or Real?, which, not having …
Ebola, "right-to-try," and placebo legislation
One of the biggest medical conspiracy theories for a long time has been that there exist out there all sorts of fantastic cures for cancer and other deadly diseases but you can’t have them because (1) “they” don’t want you to know about them (as I like to call it, the Kevin Trudeau approach) and/or (2) the evil jackbooted thugs of the FDA are so close-minded and blinded by science that they crush any attempt to market such drugs and, under the most charitable assessment under this myth, dramatically slow down the approval of such cures. The first version usually …