Research into homeopathy: data falsification, fabrication and manipulation

Re:Research into homeopathy: data falsification, fabrication... by vikramkr on Friday July 05, 2024 @05:40PM (#40886278)

Because prescribing a placebo while saying it's a medicine involves lying to the patient, which is controversial when ethical standards usually involve informed consent and a belief in patient autonomy.

> I just can’t fathom that the entire scientific community just went “ah, hm, right, placebo. I see. I guess we need to do our random-controlled-trials with a placebo control group now”. Wait, that’s it?

see that's because they didn't go like that - there's even an section on the ethics of using them in medical practice on the wikipedia article for placebo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#In_medical_practice

Plus it's a pretty important topic of discussion when it comes to pain management/opiod crisis. Unsurprisingly, a large group of professionals did not, in fact, randomly decide to ignore a very large and obvious question in the field

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Re:Research into homeopathy: data falsification, fabrication... by skrebbel on Saturday July 06, 2024 @05:43AM (#40889296)

You’re talking about the ethics of giving patients placebo medicine. That’s not what I mean.

I mean that I don’t understand why there isn’t more research into how the placebo effect works and whether there’s ways to make it work better. Reading other sections of the wikipedia article you linked, it seems to me that researchers have been stuck at “is the placebo effect even real?” for decades and few try to figure out how it works and why, and whether it can somehow be amplified. The answers to such questions might well influence the ethics discussion but “we really don’t get how it works so better not prescribe placebos” is a very unsatisfying stance to me.

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