Talking to a therapist 1 hour a week doesn't help you manage those waves of depression you feel 20x a day 6 other days of the week. If you are going to change any subconscious or neurological patterns, you need to intervene in those moments of symptoms.
Either that preexisting intervention also would have a big success rate, in which case this isn’t news and just isn’t applicable widely due to scale, or else this effect is not due to frequent attention / intervention.
> The researchers are conducting a larger, double-blinded trial in which half the participants are receiving fake treatment.
I'd think I'd either figure out that the person giving me therapy was talking nonsense pretty quickly, or their 'placebo' therapy is indistinguishable from actual therapy, in which case am I still a control?
IMO the only way to blind this is to put people in an automated machine that either turns the magnet on or it doesn't (and it makes some noises either way). You can't have highly trained professionals in the loop making people feel valuable by giving them all this attention, as that could be a confounding effect in both the alleged-treatment and the alleged-placebo.
It's fine as long as both the experimental group and the control group get the same amount of attention, right? If both groups show the same amount of improvement, that means it was caused entirely by the attention, not by the magnetic treatment.
(I agree that this is what the "double" in "double blind" means, but that's not what we were talking about.)
Note that with Reiki, it's a little more complicated to properly blind (this is an issue for pretty much every physical therapy, and surgery).
It should still be distinguished from non-placebo effects where possible and I agree with all of the concerns and worry expressed in this thread.
> Those with the high-COMT variant had the weakest placebo responses, and those with the opposite variant had the strongest. These effects were compounded by the amount of interaction each patient got: For instance, low-COMT, high-interaction patients fared best of all, but the low-COMT subjects who were placed in the no-treatment group did worse than the other genotypes in that group
> Analyzing the data amassed during the first 10 years of the study, Hall found that the women with the low-COMT gene variant had significantly higher rates of heart disease than women with the high-COMT variant, and that the risk was reduced for those low-COMT women who received the active treatments but not in those given placebos. Among high-COMT people, the results were the inverse: Women taking placebos had the lowest rates of disease; people in the treatment arms had an increased risk.
It means you don't have to buy the expensive magnet. You just get people to hang out with a patient for a couple of days and they'll respond better than 10x the average response of an SSRI.
To get a feel for the impact, an SSRI makes you an inch taller, the placebo effect makes you another inch taller. And this intervention would make you 10 inches taller.
Very very annoying that the press release over-hypes this.
Maybe she was lonely and all that time with technician was enough to help her perk up :)
>With SAINT, study participants underwent 10 sessions per day of 10-minute treatments, with 50-minute breaks in between. After a day of therapy, Lehman’s mood score indicated she was no longer depressed; it took up to five days for other participants. On average, three days of the therapy were enough for participants to have relief from depression.
One imagines that three to five 10 hour (!) days of a presumably highly-trained professional spending time and attention and focus on a patient serves as no less than an incredibly strong placebo. It would be interesting to see a blinded study where the transducer functionality was replaced by a small heater (or whatever is needed to make the system act, feel and sound the same for all involved).
It would be lovely if this held up. Depression and other psychological issues are insidious.