Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Sabrina Kilian wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> If a doctor is giving out antibiotics for a viral infection then, yes,
> they would be lying.. You give people anti-virals for viruses, which
> isn't the same thing.

Never taken a child to the doctor for a cold, or seen a mother who is
convinced that a green runny nose and a 100.1 F fever is grounds for
emergency rooms? Most head colds, sinus infections, ear infections, and
so on, are viral and not bacterial. Yet family doctors still hand out
scripts for simple antibiotics.

>As for sugar pills... Yes, in "rare" occasions
> this has been done, but its usually with a) people that don't have
> anything wrong with them in the first place, but think they do, or b)
> .... I am not sure, but its not as an alternative to *real* treatment,
> and it is an ethics issue, which, as I understand it, gets argued a lot.

There was a study on the effectiveness of anti-depressants on mild
depression. I can dig that up if you like. The sugar pill test was in a
double blind study, not open treatment. However, if the drugs are only
as useful as a sugar pill, why not skip the side effects?

> And no, I am not saying that you would advocate replacement of real
> treatment with fake ones. What I am saying is that there are already
> doctors that have fallen for the quack pseudoscience and false claims of
> many "alternative" treatments, and they *do* often advocate for the
> replacement of real medication/treatments with the ones that don't work.
> This needs to be stopped, not accelerated.

Agreed, but getting rid of "alternative" therapies will not do that. I
can picture it now: "Oh no, my super secret acupuncture tricks are so
useful, that the drug companies lobbied to have my license revoked!" I
mean, if we are talking about quacks, lets pick the very fringe of them.

> That is in fact the biggest problem. You can *test* whether certain
> things have improved, you can't *test* if the patient's perception of
> their minor aches and pains have *actually* improved from some
> treatment, because the mere belief that it should improve can skew their
> own perceptions, even if the actual pain experienced is *mechanically*
> the same. In other words, if you could measure how much pain the nerves
> where generating, it would be the same, but the *perception* of the pain
> differed. This creates a real mess with this stuff, and makes even real,
> but marginal, medications problematic to test, in some cases. They have
> to have an effect that rises "over" a specific threshold of, "This could
> just be perception, not effect."

Morphine works the same way, it doesn't stop the pain from occurring at
the site, it just blocks it on the way to the brain. Modern narcotics
don't even dissolve into the body and are metabolized into pain killing
alkaloids.

And there is a method to measure the amount and types of endorphins in
the blood. So, testing the means by which pain is reduced is not all
that difficult. Testing the amount of pain reduced in the brain versus
the amount reduced at trauma site is difficult but, when comparing it to
the standard analgesics, that isn't an issue.

> You have to take the subjective perceptions of both out of the equation,
> as much as possible, to come up with a valid study. Most of these
> studies, sadly, do neither.

Which studies do neither? Maybe we are reading different studies.

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