"The evidence for pill colour impacting placebo effects gets flimsier the more you examine it"

Looking at the evidence for one of the things that tends to get quoted as a proven fact in discussions of placebo effect:

"The BMJ tries to walk a middle ground. The review acknowledges that the evidence is inconsistent while still suggesting that colour might influence the effectiveness of a drug. It ends with a call for more research. And while it’s plausible that colour could change how patients perceive a treatment, the data don’t show a reliable and meaningful clinical effect. The studies that seem to support the idea are small, weak, and flawed. The more robust trials find little of interest."

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2024/11/...ffects-gets-flimsier-the-more-you-examine-it/

 

… until the bigger ones want a certain outcome and you start getting big and weak ? Or big and what term do they use for could be bias.

I guess it’s harder to build that [bias] in if you’ve got a test where because all you are changing is the colour of the pill you’ve no excuse not to be able to double-blind like the licensing norms for drugs/most other areas that aren’t therapist-delivered

And it’s better probably than the placebo tests because the other option is a drug likely to do something so you’ve got the trial effect of the staff watching out ‘for that’

I wonder what the size of the placebo is when it’s just placebos being given out and at best everyone play-acting to different degrees of convincing ness but don’t really as far as I’m aware have an ‘interest’ in the outcome, unless one of them is planning a career in yellow pill therapy

 

Perhaps we should focus on what we can be sure actually works: proper treatment, solid evidence, and good science?

 

Don't give 'em ideas!

 

I wish they would change the color of B12 tablets so they don't look like trazodone pills. I've mistaken them twice and got a very different effect after it was too late.

 

It says that the evidence is getting flimsier. With more time it will get even more flimsy. Eventually it will be fully debunked. Nothing will change. It will not bother a single person who has made claims like this central to their arguments. Lots of people with advanced degrees will still be saying it. Maybe they'll stop telling this one, but they'll just switch to another similar one.

All evidence for this magical *cebo effect keeps getting flimsier, it never stands up to scrutiny. But if you listen the people with lots of degrees and special letters after their names, they will mostly say the opposite. Because it feels otherwise. Not because there's any truth to it, but because they have fully bought the lies that derive from this having to be true in ways that don't allow them to go back on them.

Lots of talk about the "post-truth" era but it's obvious that we are actually in the pre-truth era. We've never had a time when the truth really dominated out perception of reality. Even experts in positions of direct authority over millions of lives are just as gullible as random person on the street, as long as it's presented the right way. They may be gullible about fewer things, or about different things, but it makes almost no difference in the end.

I don't know if it's what it's like to become an overly cynical old man but every single year over the last decade or so has made me more disappointed in humanity. And not just in small steps. I despair at having my life in the hands of other people, even experts, when this is what they do with it. I've basically become all in on full accelerationism (superintelligent AI as fast as possible) even with all the risks, I barely care about the nightmare scenarios anymore. It feels like we're already in one anyway, it's just unfolding slowly.

 

I thought we had a general placebo thread but doesn't look like it. Not that we discuss it that much.

Anyway found this interesting thread rehashing some of the common problems with all sort of claims made about placebos. IMO it's also not a thing, just an artifact of a combination of poor methodology and dealing with fuzzy data leaving lots of place for speculative beliefs.

Eventually all this silly stuff will be discarded in the same trash bin as phrenology and demonic possessions. But until then magical thinking will continue to overrule reality. People want it to be real so bad, and that can't be ignored. For all that is said, it can't be disputed that it plays a huge role in how it's been portrayed.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1857481856821899411

 

I'm glad they called out Ben Goldacre upon his pseudoscientific nonsense, I wish more skeptics would rebel against him. A lot of so called skeptics blindly follow the likes of Goldacre and the power of the mind myth that he perpetuates.