On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, mike larkin wrote:
> But of course, many of the so-called "placebo effect"
> studies are themselves open to withering criticism,
> and have been subjected to such. I saw one co-authored
> by a UConn professor where the controls were just
> laughable. So the evidence there is far from
> conclusive.
For a drug to be approved by the FDA, placebo-drug trials must be conducted. Thus virtually every drug study is in fact a "placebo effect" study. To be blunt, the evidence is conclusive: for psychological disorders like depression, the effect of placebos is about 75% of the effect of SSRIs. This is an estimate based on many studies conducted by psychiatrists, not just a single study conducted by a psychologist who's trying to fraudulently justify his therapy approach.
Also, I don't get "the controls were laughable". If we randomly assign people to drug or placebo group, we've controlled all the plausible confounds. Are you just saying they didn't do random assignment? In any case, arguing that one study on placebo effects is representative of hundreds of studies is pretty dubious. According to the same type of casual anecdotal reasoning, I should reject the idea of drug therapy because SSRIs didn't help a friend of mine who suffered from depression (about 25% of depressed people don't respond to SSRIs).
Miles