The absence of the percentage of people on placebos who guessed that they had been given the real antidepressants suggests cherry-picking. Cherry-picking suggests the entire article is garbage.
Unfortunately the article they cite is behind a paywall, but the abstract includes this: “We studied medication guesses of 137 depressed patients and/or their doctors at the end of a 6-week randomized trial of placebo, imipramine, and phenelzine. Overall, 78% of the patients and 87% of the doctors correctly distinguished between placebo and active medication”
Assuming 1⁄3 were assigned to each group, and the majority of each group guessed they were on medications, the patient percentages are pretty close to what you’d expect anyways.
That’s significant at a 99% interval with a two-tailed test, so that’s significant as far as I’m concerned. (I kept misreading that, and my first three or four calculations with that were assuming 22⁄37 placebo tests were guessing “Antidepressant” instead of “placebo”, so it took an inordinate amount of time to get there. Did the same thing reading the abstract, actually. Teach me to read more carefully.)
The absence of the percentage of people on placebos who guessed that they had been given the real antidepressants suggests cherry-picking. Cherry-picking suggests the entire article is garbage.
Unfortunately the article they cite is behind a paywall, but the abstract includes this: “We studied medication guesses of 137 depressed patients and/or their doctors at the end of a 6-week randomized trial of placebo, imipramine, and phenelzine. Overall, 78% of the patients and 87% of the doctors correctly distinguished between placebo and active medication”
Assuming 1⁄3 were assigned to each group, and the majority of each group guessed they were on medications, the patient percentages are pretty close to what you’d expect anyways.
From the paper:
That’s more useful information.
That’s significant at a 99% interval with a two-tailed test, so that’s significant as far as I’m concerned. (I kept misreading that, and my first three or four calculations with that were assuming 22⁄37 placebo tests were guessing “Antidepressant” instead of “placebo”, so it took an inordinate amount of time to get there. Did the same thing reading the abstract, actually. Teach me to read more carefully.)