NPR: The Placebo Effect Works And You Can Catch It From Your Doctor

[dreampop]

If there's one thing you do want to catch from a trip to your doctor, it's her optimism.

A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, finds that patients can pick up on subtle facial cues from doctors that reveal the doctor's belief in how effective a treatment will be. And that can have a real impact on the patient's treatment outcome.

Spoiler: the study measures subjective outcomes in response to observable behaviors that would bias their expectations. Who is writing for NPR? These days they are as lazy as the rest.

Nature Human Behavior: Socially transmitted placebo effects

Here we systematically manipulated providers’ expectations in a simulated clinical interaction involving administration of thermal pain and found that patients’ subjective experiences of pain were directly modulated by providers’ expectations of treatment success, as reflected in the patients’ subjective ratings, skin conductance responses and facial expression behaviours.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0749-5

 

[Snowdrop]

Link to the NPR story on the Nature paper here

 

[dreampop]

Link to the NPR story on the Nature paper here

whoops, my bad

 

[rvallee]

Counterpoint: the BPS model of ME. 100% expectation of success by its creators. 0% success in real life other than questionnaires, which have very little accuracy and are often biased to get this response.

F A L S I F I E D

Less magical thinking. More science. Please.

 

[Sisyphus]

There seems to be a phenomena which has emerged in many places. You might call it
The Arrogance of the Institutions, or perhaps the Arrogance Of The Idiocracy.

In the US we've spent, on average, a few hundred K$/year on our disease since it several outbreaks happened in the 80s and 90s. Until the past year or two, nearly all of it was chewed up by bureaucratic wallpapering. In any case the amount would not sustain any productive quantity of researchers.
At the same time we have an entire sub-agency, currently named NCCIH, assigned to investigate hippie-cräp, aka alternative medicine. Started in 1991, it is now given over $100,000,000 US/year to do studies on cures such as homeopathy. It was created and funded by Those Who Know Best and has consumed $2.5 Billion of the government's limited discretionary spending, while producing no effective new treatments for any disease. The original sponsor for the agency, California Senator Tom Harkin, complained that the agency has not validated enough of his pet treatments.

 

[shak8]

Medical establishment has lost their grip on hard science. Caved to popularity of unproven and unprovable alternative (complementary) bs. Yes, medicine doesn't have many, many answers. Wishful thinking, placebo response, oh what a lively waste of money it is.

Patients are at fault, too, for being uneducated in science, addicted to superstition, and thinking they know more than MDs.

I've had my own primary care doc on his way out the door saying that I should try tumeric for my arthritis. I don't think he really believed it works (after all, it's not even absorbed in the gut, or very very little, no matter how much pepper you eat with it), but he tossed out, " my patients really find that it works." What?

I live in a very post-hippie town so I guess I forgive my doc. But still, stop trying for popularity, doc and just do your job. Say you don't know. Say you're sorry I'm suffering.

 

[Midnattsol]

Medical establishment has lost their grip on hard science. Caved to popularity of unproven and unprovable alternative (complementary) bs. Yes, medicine doesn't have many, many answers. Wishful thinking, placebo response, oh what a lively waste of money it is.

Patients are at fault, too, for being uneducated in science, addicted to superstition, and thinking they know more than MDs.

I've had my own primary care doc on his way out the door saying that I should try tumeric for my arthritis. I don't think he really believed it works (after all, it's not even absorbed in the gut, or very very little, no matter how much pepper you eat with it), but he tossed out, " my patients really find that it works." What?

I live in a very post-hippie town so I guess I forgive my doc. But still, stop trying for popularity, doc and just do your job. Say you don't know. Say you're sorry I'm suffering.

I don't read much about turmeric, but other compounds that's not very well absorbed can still be anti-inflammatory from acting on gut wall integrity, microbiome, or something else in the gut that could lower inflammation in the body. Quercetin for instance can change protein expression (and other stuff! One of my favorite compounds at the moment!) in the epithelial layer of the gut at concentrations possible to obtain from eating a lot of vegetables (that again would be positive for other things) and this is in part why it is believed to be antiinflammatory. Although I wouldn't expect the doc to know that And I do agree they should just say so when they don't know.