Atheist Ireland Forum

You're quite right, that is exactly the placebo effect. And you are not alone in feeling that.

The first time we experience it is when we fall as a baby & mum "kisses it better". It doesn't make the scraped knee heal, but it usually stops the crying.

Richard Dawkins uses the doctor effect as an example of the placebo effect himself in The God Delusion (p195):


You trust that what ever is wrong with you is going to be sorted out. Of course that is going to make you feel better.

@ bipedalhumanoid

Sure, I agree with you that the red pill can relieve stress or tension & that perhaps the patient may not be able to relax by themselves without an intervention, even if it is a placebo intervention. And stress relieved (no matter how its achieved) has a genuine physiological benefit on the body.

I think what I was doubting that a red pill by itself (with no rest) would be as good as red pill + rest. Although I suppose that might depend on what the underlying condition is in the first place.

I think a lot (but not all) of psychiatric drugs and anxiety drugs are just applications of the placebo effect. Mood and level of depression is just as subjective as level of pain.

I would have thought they use a placebo as a control group to determine the efficacy of such drugs.

That's opening a whole 'nother can of worms. Properly conducted trials of course do involve placebos & double-blinded tests. But medicines don't always get tested like this, sometimes because of the not-too-kosher tactics of some pharmaceutical companies; and sometimes on more legitimate grounds such as not withholding a life-saving drug from a patient.

Some Ben Goldacre articles:
http://www.badscience.net/2008/01/washi ... the-model/
http://www.badscience.net/2010/08/give- ... rial-data/

There are, however, legitimate anti-depression drugs and anti-psychotic drugs that have remarkable and life-changing benefits for those who need them.

Here's a very good article debunking a news story from last year that declared that antidepressants were "useless".
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=3722

Science Based Medicine is a brilliant resource if you are looking for articles on medical subjects that are both skeptical as well as written by people who understand the medical material.

Here's another good article that points out that while placebo effect has a positive effect on things like pain reduction, this does not mean there can be a similar effect on other conditions such as cancer.

Placebo effect for pain