Comments on: Moerman’s Placebo

By: dlende

dlende — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:46:39 +0000

Some more materials on placebo: Somatosphere, The Prevalent Placebo BrainHealthHacks, The Neuroscience behind Hope Pure Pedantry, The Ethics of Using Placebos Biology of Mind, Exercise and the Placebo Effect

By: dlende

dlende — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 19:12:43 +0000

Mind Hacks links to a BBS radio program on placebos, a ” wonderful trip through the history and science of what we know about this most psychological of treatments.”

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/placebo_interactiv.html

By: dlende

dlende — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:48:00 +0000

Wired tells us that placebos appear to work better in children: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/paging-dr-pan-p.html

By: dlende

dlende — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:46:48 +0000

Salon has a recent article, Why "Placebo" Is Not a Dirty Word by Robert Burton. The tag? "Yes, alternative medicine works mostly by the power of suggestion. But so do a lot of conventional treatments."

By: dlende

dlende — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:51:17 +0000

Mind Hacks has some more detail on Dan Moerman’s book Meaning, Medicine and the Placebo Effect, including a nice graph and some considerations of Moerman’s meaning response: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/06/the_meaning_response.html

By: dlende

dlende — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:19:51 +0000

Another piece of research on the placebo effect, which compares double-blind studies where subjects know they have a high chance of getting a placebo versus studies where subjects know they have a low chance. Guess what? High expectations lead to greater placebo effects, but also more side effects! http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2008/05/placebo_effects.shtml

Also, The Christian Science Monitor provides a nice summary on research that shows the placebo effect has physiological effects, and cannot be reduced to psychological beliefs alone. Here’s the piece: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0831/p14s01-stss.html
The original work by Jon-Kar Zubieta appeared in The Journal of Neuroscience, where they argue that the neurological areas “engaged by the placebo may be part of a general circuit underlying the voluntary regulation of affective response.” See here: http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/25/45/10390

Mind Hacks has also just posted a consideration of recent work on the placebo, with plenty of links: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/05/placebo_is_not_what_.html

By: The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks « Neuroanthropology

The Neural Buddhists of David Brooks « Neuroanthropology — Tue, 13 May 2008 13:36:42 +0000

[...] we’ve discussed here, meditation can make the brain more compassionate. The placebo effect is better conceived as a meaning response. Beauty centers on experience and relationships, not [...]

By: Wine’s Pleasures « Neuroanthropology

Wine’s Pleasures « Neuroanthropology — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:18:30 +0000

[...] discuss the higher price=perceived better taste phenomenon. Is it just something about wine? Or a placebo effect? After all, higher priced drugs work better than lower priced drugs, even if they are [...]

By: Dan Moerman

Dan Moerman — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:36:43 +0000

I was delighted to see this blog. My work on the meaning response has been very difficult to do, and has had a rather dismal reception. The book got great reviews, but there is little critical commentary, and no one has really picked up the ideas and tried to move with them; or if they have, I haven’t seen it. It has been more popular abroad (Italy, for example; I don’t know why). But it is of course very hard for people to escape from the mechanical metaphors that we are drenched in. (Yesterday I read something that told me my brain was like a hard disk, except that something was like software. . . and I had to stop reading; I think I had a disk crash, with no backup.) Everyone knows that it’s the aspirin that stops the headache (it does play a part), but the brand name on the tablet, and the tablet itself, are at least as important as the acetylsalicylic acid. Although the whole idea is hardest on physicians (who have the most to gain, but also the most to lose) they are more likely than anthropologists to at least learn from the idea. It’s also apparently impossible for people to change language: to give up a nonsensical notion like the “placebo effect” (even more silly than, say, the “king of America” — we actually did once have a king of America. . . the last being George III). They can’t do it.

I have given talks to medical audiences; once a neurology grand rounds at a major University hospital. Grand rounds sounds grand, but basically it was a brown bag lunch. People in blue with fluffy headdresses eating their egg salad sandwiches twittered among themselves. I started talking in my doctor-audience mode, showing all the data in powerpoint slides. The tittering quieted down. I showed them the brand name aspirin working better than generic aspirin, and that four placebo tablets a day worked better than two. I showed them the effective placebo surgery (I thought the case of the pacemakers inserted but not turned on working almost as well as the regular pacemakers made a particular impact). I showed them the highly effective laser revascularization surgery for class iii and iv angina, with the lasers turned off, with powerful effects (improvement to class i or ii) a year later. And I showed them the pet scans and the fMRIs of brains of people receiving drugs, and of others receiving placebos lighting up the same way. That brain lighting up business is a real crowd-pleaser. Yada yada. And then I’m done. And there is silence in the room. Silence. Some senior deanlet asks an irrelevant question. The silence is now louder. And it’s one o’clock, and everyone has to go back to work, in the puffy blue hats. And everyone puts back on his or her armor of mechanisms, tosses meaning into the trash with the brown bag, and, thank God!, everything is normal again.

By: dlende

dlende — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:46:23 +0000

Here is a link to Science-Based Medicine’s post “Studying Placebo Effects,” which covers recent research explicitly on placebo effects. My reading? One third of the effect due just to entering the study; most robust effect comes from the doctor-patient relationship. But this is still at quite a distance from what Moerman means, and what happens in our everday lives.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=90