Placebos Are Becoming More Effective
The percentage of new pharmaceutical products that fail their effectiveness trials is growing. The culprit is the placebo effect, which appears to be stronger than in years past. If a drug cannot provide relief significantly better than a sugar pill, it won’t go on the market.
The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.
It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests.
Wired takes a look at how the placebo effect works, and the various reasons newer drugs don’t compete as well with the mind’s ability to affect our bodies. Link -via Boing Boing
Previously at Neatorama: Prozac: No Better Than Placebo?
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