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.
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.