Word: placebo
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...Comparative-effectiveness research to evaluate what works best and what doesn't: "It is stunning how little evaluation we do in the U.S. health-care system," Orszag says. Most of what is done is testing new pharmaceuticals against a placebo, he notes. "It's not done Drug A vs. Drug B vs. some procedure, let alone procedures head to head...
...beneficial physiological reaction in the body and the nervous system, leading to pain relief. (This may be the mechanism behind acupressure, which involves pressing certain points on the body to alter physiological processes occurring deep inside organs.) Or the patients' improvement may be due simply to a powerful placebo effect, in which the mere belief that you are receiving a new pain-relieving treatment leads to actual reduction of symptoms. "What is it about the therapeutic experience that really helps people? This study raises the question that if there are pathways to relief that work more through mind than through...
...while these results suggest that you might not even need the full-fledged needle-penetrating version to find relief, no physician is quite ready to recommend pricking yourself with toothpicks. "Further studies are going to have to tease out the relative magnitude of the placebo effect from the physiological effects of acupuncture," says Nahin. "But for patients, what the study tells you is that if you are having pain that is not being well managed by standard care, then acupuncture is a viable option...
...past few years, researchers have challenged the effectiveness of Prozac and other SSRIs in several studies. For instance, a review published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in February attributed 68% of the benefit from antidepressants to the placebo effect. Likewise, a paper published in PLoS Medicine a year earlier suggested that widely used SSRIs, including Prozac, Effexor and Paxil, offer no clinically significant benefit over placebos for patients with moderate or severe depression. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies maintain that their research shows that SSRIs are powerful weapons against depression. (Here's a helpful blog post that summarizes the debate...
Each study participant was given an identically labeled bleach bottle, but only half of the bottles actually contained bleach. (Although patients, or at least their parents, could easily distinguish whether they were in the bleach group or the placebo group by smelling the contents of their bottle, they were instructed not to tell the researchers which group they were in.) Those who received real bleach were instructed to draw a bath twice a week with a heavily diluted bleach solution - a half-cup of bleach per 40 gallons of water - and immerse their limbs and torsos, leaving the neck...