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harm. Homeopathic medicines contain negligible active ingredients. If thousands of homeopaths and millions of patients, as Mark Twain said, wanted to “bribe death with a sugar pill to stay away,” that was their problem. The other two most important pseudoscientific medical protocols that excited and entranced Americans in the mid-1800s were
The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
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—the drugs they’d been selling for ten, fifteen, or twenty years. Suddenly, all the drugs were increasingly failing to do any better than a sugar pill in double-blind trials. It was a broad, confusing phenomenon; old and new antidepressants were failing seven out of ten times and being abandoned without
Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen · 5 Sep 2017
harm. Homeopathic medicines contain negligible active ingredients. If thousands of homeopaths and millions of patients, as Mark Twain said, wanted to “bribe death with a sugar pill to stay away,” that was their problem. The other two most important pseudoscientific medical protocols that excited and entranced Americans in the mid-1800s were
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by Elaine N. Aron · 1 Dec 2013 · 323pp · 94,683 words
of the body? Are they just placebos for most people, making them feel good to the same degree as if they had been given a sugar pill? But what about many suicides they have surely prevented? Haven’t they also improved the lives of people close to those who are no longer
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by James D. Miller · 14 Jun 2012 · 377pp · 97,144 words
case when you participate in a double-blind drug trial), then you would experience a 10 percent performance improvement.265 C. If you took a sugar pill and were told that there was a 50 percent chance that it was real, then you would experience a 4 percent performance improvement, all of
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by Michael Pollan · 30 Apr 2018 · 547pp · 148,732 words
, and neither they nor their monitors knew in any given session whether they were getting psilocybin or a placebo, and whether that placebo was a sugar pill or any one of half a dozen different psychoactive drugs. In fact the placebo was Ritalin, and as it turned out, the monitors guessed wrong
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by Johann Hari · 1 Jan 2018 · 428pp · 126,013 words
through a rigorous process. Your drug has to be tested on two groups: one is given the real drug, and the other is given a sugar pill (or some other placebo). Then the scientists compare these groups. You are allowed to sell the drug to the public only if it does significantly
…
are in the first group, they tell you they are giving you a chemical antidepressant—but in fact, they simply give you a placebo: a sugar pill, as effective as John Haygarth’s wand. If you are in the second group, you are told you were being given a chemical antidepressant—and
…
you actually get one. And if you are in the third group, you aren’t given anything—no drug, and no sugar pill; you are just followed over time. The third group, Irving says,5 is really important—although almost all studies leave it out. “Imagine,” he explains
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subtract all the people who would have just gotten better anyway. Then you subtract all the people who got better when they were given a sugar pill. What’s left is the real effect of the drug. But when they added up the figures from all the publicly available scientific studies on
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. Irving and Guy realized—using these, the real figures—they could calculate how much better the people on antidepressants were doing than the people on sugar pills. Scientists measure the depth of someone’s depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959
The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr · 1 Jan 2013 · 476pp · 134,735 words
athletes go faster, for longer and with less pain and convince asthma sufferers they’re better, even when they’re not. It is why four sugar pills work more effectively than two; why sham injections work better than sham capsules, capsules work better than pills, big pills work better than small pills
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’t want consumers to know the truth,’ he says. ‘Every reputable study of these fake drugs has shown them to have no more effect than sugar pills.’ And then the moment arrives. The crowd shouts, ‘3, 2, 1, There’s nothing in it!’ And the sound of three hundred nerds crunching nothing
…
, M.D. et al., ‘Active Albuterol or Placebo, Sham Acupuncture, or No Intervention in Asthma’, New England Journal of Medicine, 14 July 2011. 42 four sugar pills: D. E. Moerman, ‘Cultural variations in the placebo effect: ulcers, anxiety & blood pressure’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2000. 42 sham injections work better: A. J. de
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D. · 7 Sep 2015 · 600pp · 174,620 words
Trauma Clinic. They slept more soundly; they had more control over their emotions and were less preoccupied with the past than those who received a sugar pill.20 Surprisingly, however, the Prozac had no effect at all on the combat veterans at the VA—their PTSD symptoms were unchanged. These results have
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EMDR with standard doses of Prozac or a placebo.2 Of our eighty-eight subjects thirty received EMDR, twenty-eight Prozac, and the rest the sugar pill. As often happens, the people on placebo did well. After eight weeks their 42 percent improvement was greater than that for many other treatments that
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
by David France · 29 Nov 2016
, which was still being used. None of the patients on the ward experienced ill effects. Apparently, the L drug was as well tolerated as the sugar pills. When Bahlman returned a few weeks later for a second dose, Dr. Fauci paid him a visit. Bahlman enjoyed the proximity to Fauci’s world
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