… In fact, even when publishing what could be a scientifically interesting and medically useful paper on placebo effects, its editors allowed the authors, led by Ted Kaptchuk, to spin the results in a way to imply that patients can have symptomatic relief without actual reversal of the underlying physiologic derangement that caused their symptoms in the first place and that that's OK. In this case, the disease was asthma, and the paper published showed that placebo acupuncture resulted in asthma patients feeling better but didn't reverse the airway constriction that led patients to feel short of breath in the first place. Peter Lipson quite properly described this as "folly," …Plus some criticism of postmodernism and
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Orac – in passing – on the Placebo effect
Orac:
quack non-medicine.
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