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A Case Against the Placebo Effect
The picture that emerges is that a placebo pill has almost no effect when administered by researchers who do not care about the placebo effect, but the exact same pill has an enormous effect larger…
This is a tricky question, but to take a stab at it, Olsen et al. (2017)(which includes our friend Asbjørn Hróbjartsson as an author) analyzed 37 studies that sought to investigate the magnitude of the clinically important difference in pain, based on mapping numerical scores to patient report of feeling better: A study from 2022, al’Absi et al. (2021), got a small effect at p = .04, the Cursed Value, for reduction of stress-induced analgesia on a cold pain test (subjects had to hold their hands in a bucket of freezing ice water slurry as long as they could stand). Swanton makes three increasingly valiant attempts (with 15 or 16 rats per comparison group, a large sample by the literature’s standards) to replicate Lee et al. (2014), A new animal model of placebo analgesia: involvement of the dopaminergic system in reward learning.
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