buybuydandavis comments on Fallacies of reification - the placebo effect - Less Wrong

20 Post author: Morendil 13 September 2012 07:03AM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 13 September 2012 09:36:08AM 0 points [-]

The Placebo Effect should be the difference between No Treatment and Sham Treatment for an identified problem. One could also consider an Ignorance Treatment where patients are asymptomatic, and a Denial Treatment, where you just tell the patient "it's nothing, don't worry about it".

I believe studies have been able to show a statistically significant outcomes between Placebo Treatment and No Treatment.

I'm personally quite annoyed with knee jerk "that's just placebo" claims, which then go on to claim that if a certain statistic of a certain treatment regime for a certain substance on a certain population didn't pass some statistical significance test relative to a sham treatment, then the substance "has no effect", etc.

So I don't think the problem is that Sham Treatments have no statistically significant effect on outcome, but that people leap to unwarranted conclusions from failures to reject null hypotheses.