Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Wish I knew where to find them. Hmm. Ask Penn and Teller? They where the
> ones that tracked down the guy, whose name I can't even remember. But,
> he was, apparently, for a while, one of the #1 people running around
> advocating its use, and even still has the bus he used to treat people,
> as part of spreading the idea around. He now uses it to show people why
> its bunk.

I will keep digging then. I keep journal search engines bookmarked,
because I keep finding my self needing things to read.

> And for why its not placebo.. I never said it wasn't. But we don't use
> placebos, in most cases, for one key reason, and two lesser ones. The
> main one is ethics. To make a placebo work you have to basically *lie*
> to a patient. The others are 1) lying about the effect of such a
> treatment allows those denying that it "is" placebo to continue to
> suggest that its not, and that a whole host of other BS is real too, 2)
> some of those things *can be* and *are* dangerous, under certain
> circumstance, and 3) people may opt to use the placebo, and refuse
> *real* treatment. The later two happen all the time, and people die from
> it every single year, some of them children.

"We" . . . If you are speaking from medical training, I will defer to
better knowledge of the field. Just let me know. All I know is from
years on the patient side of things.

Beyond that, I got my wording mixed up. Happens, I suck at English some
days. I wasn't openly advocating the use of placebos over all other
drugs. I was trying to say that if acupuncture and sham acupuncture have
similar success rates for Disorder X (what ever that individual symptom
or ailment is), and that success rate is higher than the known placebo
effect of around 30%, then why not use it. Why not study it?

> You can't lie to patients,

Yes you can. Every time a doctor gives out some antibiotics for a viral
infection, that's a placebo. Sugar pills were found to have roughly the
same effective treatment rate for mild depression and anxiety. So
someone gets a mild anti-depressant for times when they are just feeling
blue, another placebo.

"Just feeling blue" may be a local phrase. What I reference is feeling
justifiably depressed and sad; dog or parents died, wife left, house
burned down, things of that nature.

> and you can't support things that result in
> people failing to take treatments for *serious* conditions, by only
> taking the placebo.

Was not suggesting that at all. If another medical treatment has better
results, great. But, benefit analysis needs to be done, between the
doctor and patient, on the side effects too.

> And then... there are the "doctors" who haven't
> managed to get their license pulled, because they are not *technically*
> doing anything they *know* (or at least believe) is wrong, who may hurt
> or kill people by advocating the placebo *instead* of the real
> treatments. And, since no rules exist to prevent it, other than the
> ethics rules, which deny use of such things at all, opening the door to
> them means you have no way to remove such doctors from their practice
> for malpractice.

Those same fake doctors have an arsenal of things they can claim work,
with propped up studies that back them up. Hunt them down, sure, but it
doesn't hurt to look at their data just to see if one in a thousand of
them might have been on to something real.

> Its literally one of those slippery slope issues that it would be *far*
> better to avoid than advocate openly.
>

Post a reply to this message