Fake It Till You Make It: Placebos Are Getting More Effective

wired.com:

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn't introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system."

Read the whole story: wired.com

Comments

[yorkriver1]

I find the article vaguely disturbing, in that there is the underlying motive of preserving drug company profits. Rather than looking for how to harness the mind as a possible alternative to drugs, it's how do we outsmart the placebo effect so we can sell more drugs.

[NoSillyName]

Placebos don't work very well with skeptics.

[euthman]

The most intense placebo effect occurs when both patient and doctor are fooled into thinking strong medicine is being given. Behold: alternative medicine!

[jwander1]

I guess you just like saying stupid stuff like this to rile people up. Instead of a placebo effect, you're a kind of a - - hole effect. If anything, this article shows that it's conventional drugs that may rely most on the placebo effect.

[euthman]

No, what it says is that mental state influences physiologic response. Legitimate scientists understand this and test experimental treatments against placebos. Alternativists either don't understand, or just ignore it, and don't bother.

[Idea1013]

I find myself wondering how many of those commenting here actually read the article. The talk of irresponsibility and "mess[ing] with their minds and ruin a depresed person's chance of recovery by confusing them about wether their medicine is a placebo," etc. etc., lead me to believe most of you didn't bother.
1. Placebos are used for trials, that is, to test the effectiveness of a drug on a condition against the use of nothing. Your doctor does not give you placebos for your depression. If you sign up for a drug trial, you are informed that there is a chance that you will receive a placebo.
2. It would be irresponsible NOT to test these drugs under the strictest of conditions.
3. Perhaps pharmaceutical companies should look inward for at least one root of this problem. They fought so hard to be allowed to advertise prescription meds on t.v. and now, that may be coming back to bight them. After all, if a patient has an expectation of feeling better, that in itself can lead to a placebo effect, throwing off their trials.

[Angie Cordeiro - Huffpost Blogger]

The Living Matrix Movie Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne-I7JTXCbo

[JDM73]

I'm a chronic pain patient, and I guarantee you that I can tell the difference between something and nothing.

[StephenJK]

not talking about killing pain. Pain is pain and needs to be remedied ASAP. Less pain equals more effective healing.

What, I think, the article talks about is the power of the human mind. People should realize something from this article. That realization should be that it's not the idea of putting something inside you that you think cures what ails you, its, simply, YOU.

Everyone has the power to heal themselves to some degree. Both psychologically and physically.

This day and age we are too dependent on others to help us. We should all become more independent. That means going to the doctor once a year for a general check up and not every time you have a cough or a pulled muscle. All they'll do, generally speaking, is prescribe you some "medicine" to "cure" your ills. 99% of the time we don't need anything.

Big Pharma is a big joke. Personally, I'd rather go naturally then full of synethically derived "medicine". Thanks, though.

[DallasDon]

Big Pharma may be a joke to you but they saved my life ten years ago. I'd be dead now without them; As would millions of other people.

[JDM73]

Ah, but a prominent study was recently released which claims to show evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy is effective in treating pain. This is the direction in which all medical treatment appears to be headed: think the problem away. Wish it away. Repress it. And I'm not interested in that kind of "treatment" when my bum leg wakes me up groaning at 2 o'clock in the morning.

First, the article which claims to demonstrate CBT's effectiveness in treating pain and insomnia (sorry, I'm not buying it):

"Behavioral Therapy for Pain and Insomnia"
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=104742

Next, two articles examining how useful CBT actually is:

"Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking"
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1909019,00.html?xid=rss-health

"All You Need Is Cognitive Behaviour Therapy?" (note, in particular, the commentaries "Benevolent scepticism is just what the doctor ordered" and "The 'evidence' is weaker than claimed")
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1122202

As for Big Pharma being a joke, in many ways I agree. This doesn't mean that people don't need medications, however. The mind doesn't heal cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and HIV.

[humaneismyth]

also,now maybe people can OD on their medicine just to see if its really a placebo or not.Lets talk about how people are paying up the a..s..s for these "placebos"­.Irrespons­ible journalism!~!!!

[steppenwolfsayshi]

The title is really misleading. If the number of trials from the placebo effect are being scrapped, it means fewer are being scrapped because of drug side-effects or scientific misconduct. That's a good thing. It's a good article by wired. It's about new computer modeling in global trials and attempts understand­/control/u­se the placebo effect. Pretty cool

[humaneismyth]

way to freak people out,mess with their minds and ruin a depresed person's chance of recovery by confusing them about wether their medicine is a placebo or not.Nice.Thanks.Uou obviously have never been severly depressed or you would not think it is so funny to sabotage other's recovery this way.Placebo or no placebo..I don't want to know and now I know and Im screwed.

[steppenwolfsayshi]

It is irresponsible.

[StephenJK]

What needs to happen is we need to adopt better methods of growing as individuals in the psychological sense. We're all kind of thrown to the wolves. First, with school and then with career. Not all of us were well equipped going into the fray and now a lot of us have difficulties dealing with the most mundane activities day to day. Some deal with it so long that it changes the chemical makeup of our brains and pins us into submission (depressio­n...whatev­er you want to call it).

Personally, and no offense to you, I would rather go insane than introduce eventually permanently mind altering substances into my brain.

I'm sorry for your depression. I suffer with it as well. I just chose to fill my life with other things that make me happy.

[jade7243]

placebo /pla·ce·bo/ (plah-se´bo) [L.] any dummy medical treatment; originally, a medicinal preparation having no specific pharmacological activity against the patient's illness or complaint given solely for the psychophysiological effects of the treatment; more recently, a dummy treatment administered to the control group in a controlled clinical trial in order that the specific and nonspecific effects of the experimental treatment can be distinguished.

Dorland's Medical Dictionary for Health Consumers. © 2007 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Somehow I don't get how some folks can be all bent out of shape about "big PhrMa" and yet embrace New Age "Complementary and Alternative Medicine" (CAM) that ,in far too many cases, amounts to the same thing as peddling placebos and false hope. Instead of telling the patient "take the blue pill to get horny" and the "pink pill to cure your depression," the New Agers have you load up on supplements like St. John's Wort or saw palmetto. Proponents of "intensive lifestyle change" tiptoe up to the line of encouraging folks to ignore sound medical advice and treatment for unproven folk remedies concocted from "stoned thinking," not empirical double-blind controlled studies. Show me placebos sold by big Phrma and I'll show you placebos sold by that "integrative" "preventive" huckster over there.

[StephenJK]

nature, so far, has held probably 99% of all cures known to big pharma.

[Gnrshrtd]

Yes, many conditions are self-limiting, and intervention sometimes is not necessary.

Patients have a role (not blame) in this problem. They have been conditioned to expect to leave a medical appointment with a prescription. I have developed the habit of reminding my doctor that if my complaint is typically self-resolving or can be addressed by a change in routine (diet, exercise, setting aside time to calm one's thoughts), I preferred not to take the drug. If, in her professional judgment, intervention was indicated, I requested the least invasive tx first. She seemed relieved.

There are, of course, public heath considerations in some medical interventions.

In my own practice, I have seen patients with a baseline that would be considered in a text book to indicate pathology, yet the patient remained stable for the entire time, up to ten years, that I worked in that setting, and I have no evidence to believe that changed when I left.

That said, I do not in any way advocate that appropriate interventions be abandoned, if a proper differential diagnosis has been performed and the patient's condition clearly requires it.

[illinoisan]

There ought to be a law - or at least a best practice guideline - that any non-emergency prescription should be first administered as a placebo. Then if the indication persists, the script should graduate to the actual medicine.

Also, SRI scripts should be withheld until the patient has first tried abstinence from alcohol. I imagine most cases of depression would vanish with the cessation of alcohol and alcohol shouldn't be mixed with SRIs anyway.

However, pharma profits ARE more important than health outcomes.

[StephenJK]

SRIs are a terrible bandaid and now cannot be reversed. They are a permanent alteration of brain chemistry after a certain time aren't they?

[boilinabag]

and you wonder why we need health care reform... pharma is out of control...