Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Noble  Did any of these directly compare a placebo group with a matched non-treatment group?. |
I have a suspicion that this may be the heart of the problem. Splitting people into two groups and just telling one lot to go home (and not seek out any other treatment!) may be very hard. Probably if you want to test the power of the placebo effect, you really do need to compare it against clinical expectations.
My hunch might be that a lot of studies, like those I quoted, got eliminated because they simply could not deliver a comparison with no treatment.
Certainly, research into the placebo phenomenon seems to resemble parapsychology a lot - lots of observations with meta-analyses that exclude certain observations as unreliable, lots of arguments and different points of view
I would still bet that the best alternative medicine practitioners are very effective at getting the brain to do whatever it does when it thinks the body has received a powerful medicine.
David