Wired Magazine On The Placebo Effect
An interesting article appeared in Wired last week and I assume it’s in the current issue of the magazine. It concerns the placebo effect and the pharma industry’s attempts to capture it somehow since that would be major money for them. While much remains murky around the effect, there are some startling facts in the article:
“By the late ’90s, for example, the classic antianxiety drug diazepam (also known as Valium) was still beating placebo in France and Belgium. But when the drug was tested in the US, it was likely to fail. Conversely, Prozac performed better in America than it did in western Europe and South Africa.”
What’s more, even tightly-controlled clinical trials still had placebo effect all over the place. And the color of a medication matters too.
The article’s author, Steven Silberman, interviewed me many months ago and I walked him through what I knew about the placebo effect in depression: very powerful in teens and kids, long lasting in adults and possibly accounting for 80 percent or so of the long-term effect of anti-depressants. I explained that regardless of where the effect was coming from, it had huge implications for depression treatment. Why give people tons of meds with big problems of their own when it’s clear something else may be at work?
I also pointed out that there are also plenty of clinical trials for schizophrenia treatments in which there’s a placebo response of 20 percent or so. That’s very striking for a disorder where there’s not supposed to be much of a placebo effect at all. What could possibly account for that? What could we learn from it about treating psychosis without using harsh medications?
None of that really made its way into the article, but it’s such a big topic and such a poorly-understood phenomenon that I know an article looking into it all can end up in all kinds of places. It’s well-worth reading.
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