March 6th, 2008
Extending the placebo analogy
Today’s belaboring the obvious study comes from MIT, where 82 patients “proved” that a placebo priced at $2.50 per pill does a better job than the same pill priced at 10 cents.
(Buy Dylan Evans’ The Belief Effect, right, here. “Guaranteed” to make you feel 100% better about this.)
This is supposed to be good enough for publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Question. Haven’t these people ever seen a Woody Allen movie?
Allen has been using this cliche for 40 years now, expensive psychiatrists doing patients no good at all. What does having “the best” (as opposed to one of the best) hospitals, at twice the cost, provide beyond a placebo effect?
Still, this is big news. It’s in all the papers.
What can we do with it? Well, the profession has been doing an awful lot with this for years and years. Wasn’t it just last week that we learned most anti-depressant effects are akin to those of a placebo?
Scammers and thieves have also been using the results of this study. I have a neighbor dieing of breast cancer right now who thinks she’ll get better from the placebo effect of better nutrition. She won’t and I’m sick about it.
Maybe I need a placebo. An expensive one.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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