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Kevin comments on Study shows placebos can work even if you know it's a placebo - Less Wrong
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Comments (16)
I hope you mean disturbing in a good way, as in "I am committed to understanding the world, not finding evidence to support my view of how I want the world to look." I knowingly use the placebo effect on myself, relieving all sorts of things with ibuprofen. I figure the little bit of real pain relief the ibuprofen provides probably helps me to imagine myself better in other ways after I take it.
Perhaps the placebo effect works even when you know it is a sugar pill in the same way that essentially all optical illusions work even though we know they are illusions. Placebo effect probably reflects some deep wiring in us, which would hardly be expected to go away just because we know about it.
A possible defect in the study: it was based on people reporting improvement. That my knowing I took a fake pill might get me to report a fake improvement I don't think should be ruled out. I think I would like to see if Placebos can lower temperature in a fever, and compare the effectiveness of placebos when we tell you its a placebo and placebos given in all seriousness as an implied effective drug.
Ibuprofen isn't exactly a trivial pain reliever; it's decidedly more effective than tylenol and about the same effectiveness as codeine.
May be true on average, but YMMV. I find it slightly less effective than paracetamol (Tylenol) and way less than codeine. (I have a dodgy back and a keen interest in painkillers at times.)
Codeine is almost always mixed with tylenol or another painkiller, and in its mixed form is more effective than pure codeine or ibuprofen. I meant that pure codeine is about as ibuprofen (not by weight, but by equivalent dosages) but it's not really a useful comparison because pure codeine is rarely prescribed.