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Submitted by Paul Alper
Submitted by Paul Alper
==Placebos getting stronger?==
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124367058&ft=1&f=1003 The growing power of the sugar pill]<br>
by Alix Spiegel, NPR, 8 March 2010
The randomized double-blind placebo-controlled experiment is regarded as the &quot;gold standard&quot; in medical research.  This story describes new research indicating that our response to placebo treatments may be getting stronger over time.    One example of this so-called &quot;placebo drift&quot; phenomenon is provided by Arthur Barsky, the director of psychiatric research at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.  Barsky compared trials on antidepressants from the 1980s with studies done in 2005, and found that the reactions to placebos had become twice as strong. 
Ted Kaptchuk of the Harvard Medical School suggested a number of possible explanations. First, antidepressants have become more widely accepted in society.  The more that people expect treatment to be successful, the better they tend to react to being treated, even with a placebo.  Another possibility may related to funding, which increasingly comes from pharmaceutical companies.  This creates pressure for the research to succeed, which could potentially bias the evaluation of the treatment.  Finally, he notes that increased demand for research subjects may lead to the enrollment of marginally depressed people in the studies.  Such subjects, who require less help to begin with, might plausibly be more responsive to placebos. 
Kaptchuk has conducted earlier research on placebos.  In a 2006 report entitled [http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/all-placebos-not-created-equal All placebos not created equal], Kaptchuk demonstrated that a fake acupuncture treatment could exhibit a stronger placebo effect than a fake pill in treating pain.  In this case, Kaptchuk attributed the difference to the &quot;medical ritual&quot; associated with the acupuncture treatment.
Last summer, Wired Magazine had an [http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect article] describing a number of drug trials that were cancelled at various stages when the drugs failed to outperform placebos.  Among these is an anti-depressant drug under development by the pharmaceutical company Merck.
Submitted by Bill Peterson

Revision as of 01:40, 20 April 2010

Tea party graphics

A mighty pale tea
by Charles M. Blow, New York Times, 16 April 2010

This article recounts Blow's experience visiting a Tea Party rally as a self-identified as an "infiltrator". He was interested in assessing the group's diversity. Reproduced below is a portion of a graphic from the article, entitled The Many Shades of Whites

Submitted by Paul Alper

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