Thanks for the links, I’ll take a look in particular at the Benedetti et al. stuff.
The IBS study was already the topic of the previous, linked discussion so I don’t expect to get any more out of it—I’ve already explained why it (and the excerpt you bolded above) are not sufficient grounds for the claim “there is such a thing as the placebo effect”.
Alice: Yeah, I had that problem for years
Has Alice also had two back surgeries? Otherwise, I’d assign more probability to the hypothesis that their differential response to pain meds has something to do with their different medical histories.
A definition closer to my intended meaning would be something like “the effect caused by the perceptions and expectations of the patient, rather than the particular substance being administered in the treatment”.
I find this confusing: in the relevant experimental setups, nobody is directly manipulating (intervening on) “the perceptions and expectations of the patient”. These perceptions and expectations are themselves an effect, usually not measured except indirectly through the patient’s self-reports and voluntarily controlled responses.
What is being manipulated in the studies I’ve seen (e.g. the IBS study) is a specific experimental condition, namely the type of treatment being administered: either a particular substance or a particular therapeutic intervention or gesture.
When people talk about placebo effect, I take them to mean something like “the mysterious healing power of the mind”; that is, they predict that there is a reliable causal effect of holding particular beliefs, other than voluntarily selecting behavioural responses consistent with the beliefs, in particular an amelioration of some pathology or a mitigation of some symptoms. In the IBS studies and in the Dougherty case, the effects observed are all voluntarily selected responses—there is nothing more mysterious at work than the desire to behave or respond in ways consistent with a professed belief.
Ingesting an inert pill (vs a similar pill with paracetamol) doesn’t make my headache or back ache go away, it just makes me less likely to verbally report pain than I would otherwise have. What really takes care of the pain is the paracetamol, and that’s what I happen to be interested in.
Playing games with my own expectations, so as to elicit behaviour that is already under my control, is of limited value—if I want to shut up about the pain, I can just decide to shut up about the pain. (I would predict that a study comparing spontaneous pain reports under differential treatments of “Verbal instruction to suppress pain by not reporting it” and “Administration of inert pill” would favor verbal instruction in a wide range of pain-causing injuries or pathologies.)
Thanks for the links, I’ll take a look in particular at the Benedetti et al. stuff.
The IBS study was already the topic of the previous, linked discussion so I don’t expect to get any more out of it—I’ve already explained why it (and the excerpt you bolded above) are not sufficient grounds for the claim “there is such a thing as the placebo effect”.
Has Alice also had two back surgeries? Otherwise, I’d assign more probability to the hypothesis that their differential response to pain meds has something to do with their different medical histories.
I find this confusing: in the relevant experimental setups, nobody is directly manipulating (intervening on) “the perceptions and expectations of the patient”. These perceptions and expectations are themselves an effect, usually not measured except indirectly through the patient’s self-reports and voluntarily controlled responses.
What is being manipulated in the studies I’ve seen (e.g. the IBS study) is a specific experimental condition, namely the type of treatment being administered: either a particular substance or a particular therapeutic intervention or gesture.
When people talk about placebo effect, I take them to mean something like “the mysterious healing power of the mind”; that is, they predict that there is a reliable causal effect of holding particular beliefs, other than voluntarily selecting behavioural responses consistent with the beliefs, in particular an amelioration of some pathology or a mitigation of some symptoms. In the IBS studies and in the Dougherty case, the effects observed are all voluntarily selected responses—there is nothing more mysterious at work than the desire to behave or respond in ways consistent with a professed belief.
Ingesting an inert pill (vs a similar pill with paracetamol) doesn’t make my headache or back ache go away, it just makes me less likely to verbally report pain than I would otherwise have. What really takes care of the pain is the paracetamol, and that’s what I happen to be interested in.
Playing games with my own expectations, so as to elicit behaviour that is already under my control, is of limited value—if I want to shut up about the pain, I can just decide to shut up about the pain. (I would predict that a study comparing spontaneous pain reports under differential treatments of “Verbal instruction to suppress pain by not reporting it” and “Administration of inert pill” would favor verbal instruction in a wide range of pain-causing injuries or pathologies.)