Discussion about placebos often focuses on the boring thing: "gotcha, the treatment didn't work the way you thought it would.." The cool thing about placebos is past that: "..didn't work the way you thought it would, because the body did ??something?? and fixed itself"
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@adamjensenat brought up nocebos, placebos' negative opposite. And that we might be experiencing nocebo effects /right now/, which could be some sweet sweet low hanging fruit if soShow this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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I've read somewhere that when your body is relaxed during a car crash, rather than tensed up, that can reduce chances of a bad injury. Similarly, I'd expect that part of the placebo effect is from relaxing due to worrying about it less, because "oh the pill will take care of it!"
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I haven't considered that! Stress is a major contributor to health problems, that does make sense
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Attention
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What kind of attention works best? Why would this work? (Not that I disagree, but 'attention' is vague)
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It also sets a (shockingly powerful) lower bound to what is possible just by thinking I wouldn’t be surprised if the right kind of not yet invented meditation can capture at least this much upside
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Prediction: once we have decent real time probes for things like GABA activity, people will be able to learn to gradient ascent it by learning a new sense Similar to learning to push/pull fake object with eeg, learning GAN latent space, see with tongue probes etc We’re v plastic
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I think placebo groups improve mostly for disappointing reasons: Regression to the mean, research fraud, and biased answers on the symptom survey. The main benefit of placebo-ideology is that a well-defined intervention is much harder to cheat on than an observational study.
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But you can also ascertain the placebo effect when studies run a placebo *and* a no-treatment arm, and the placebo effect does still exist (albeit in a smaller slice of conditions)
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Here I wrote about *some* of the ways in which placebos work http://luca-dellanna.com/pain-signal-vulnerability … TL;DR: Placebos act in 3+ ways: 1) sometimes, our body doesn’t deploy healing processes to save energy if he believes he might need it. Placebos signal safe environment → can heal [1/N]
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2/ Pain is a signal of vulnerability, not of damage (though in lot of cases, damage is a predictor of vulnerability): it signals the need for a behavioral adjustment. If a placebo manages to make us subjectively feel less vulnerable, it will suppress pain. [2/N]
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