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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Dec. 14 - Dec. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Same objection: do such exist? Can you give any examples?
The problem is that the difference between (psychosomatic) placebo and natural healing is just the involvement of the mind. If no natural healing is possible, what kind of magic is the mind doing?
It's easier to exclude placebo -- e.g. if the patient is in a long-term coma, no placebo effects seem to be possible.
Physical injury, chronic disease.
I meant placebo as baseline effect (from all sources, psychosomatic or statistical), and the falsifiable prediction is it should drastically decrease in situations where regression to the mean should not happen.
Not clear why psychosomatic effects happen, may work in coma. Very clear why regression to the mean happens, well understood issue in sampling from a distribution. So: easier to exclude well-understood thing.
Actually, you can view this as a causal issue, the blog post is really about a type of selection bias, or "confounding by health status."
edit: Lumifer, this is curious. I mentioned chronic disease in my original response. Do you ... parse what people write before you respond?
I think the core point of that article (and one I agree with) is that if we want to attribute the 'placebo effect' to medical care, we need to measure not the difference between the patient before and after placebo treatment, but the difference between the after for no treatment and the after for placebo treatment. And so it seems very useful (for determining the social benefit of medicine / homeopathy / etc.) to separate out psychosomatic effects (which are worth paying for) from statistical effects (which aren't worth paying for).
Sure, I agree. If the article is right.