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Originally Posted by Chris Noble  I am perfectly willing to come to the table and support the modest claims that I have made. I am not going to play a silly game where the entire burden is shifted to me.
Quit your silly whining about Skeptics. |
I don't come here to play 'silly games', I come here because I am interested in the nature of consciousness, and its potential relationship to Ψ.
This subject covers an awful lot of areas - QM, consciousness, psychology, statistics, various medical matters such as placebos and NDE phenomena, not to mention parapsychology. None of us can be knowledgeable in all these areas, and have to take some things on trust. My background is not medical, and while I could, no doubt, GOOGLE a variety of papers supporting what I THOUGHT was the accepted position regarding placebos, I would rather others came up with evidence to counter what you have claimed - i.e. that the placebo effect is mainly confined to pain relief and other subjective benefits.
I must admit that your claim surprises me - for example, although you have explained that controls are needed in medical trials to avoid the effects of intrinsic disease variability (and possible efforts by drug companies to cheat), if the placebo effect were not relevant, I would have thought that once the random selection had been performed, there would be no point in going to the trouble and expense of a double blind trial. Indeed, my impression WAS that the placebo effect was a real pain in the ass in medical and even animal research!
David