Placebos Can Work Even Without Deception

Alex

Placebos work because people who take it believe that they're actually medicine, right? I mean, that's the basic tenet of every modern medical studies, which use placebos as controls.

But can placebos work without any deception? Here's an intriguing study from Harvard Medical School that discovered the surprising healing power of sugar pills:

"Not only did we make it absolutely clear that these pills had no active ingredient and were made from inert substances, but we actually had 'placebo' printed on the bottle," says Kaptchuk. "We told the patients that they didn't have to even believe in the placebo effect. Just take the pills."

For a three-week period, the patients were monitored. By the end of the trial, nearly twice as many patients treated with the placebo reported adequate symptom relief as compared to the control group (59 percent vs. 35 percent). Also, on other outcome measures, patients taking the placebo doubled their rates of improvement to a degree roughly equivalent to the effects of the most powerful IBS medications.

"I didn't think it would work," says senior author Anthony Lembo, HMS associate professor of medicine at BIDMC and an expert on IBS. "I felt awkward asking patients to literally take a placebo. But to my surprise, it seemed to work for many of them."

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Seeing as the control group didn't take any pills, the control isn't really as rigorous as it could be as it does not control for the ritual of taking a pill which could contribute to the placebo effect independently of belief in the treatment due to previous experience that associates taking a pill with feeling better. Seeing as this is merely a replication of much older studies with similar findings it would have been more informative and scientifically rigorous to have a group unknowingly taking placebos as an additional control so that not only would the ritual of taking a pill be controlled for, but we can see whether the placebo effect is weakened by knowledge that the pills are placebos.
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Find similarities to other human languages? That's incredibly obtuse. Human languages have innate similarities and they're all produced by human vocal anatomy. It's unlikely that an alien species would have evolved to make sounds even as comprehensible to us as dolphins or whales make. And to expect any structural similarity, much less any common root words from a species that evolved on another world seems unlikely in the extreme.
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BJN: Actually it's more complicated than that. There are languages from geographically close locations that do not share common origins.

Take for instance Scottish, Irish, and English - these three languages exist in the United Kingdom only miles of each other, yet they are completely distinct from each other.

The language tree is a fascinating subject. You can find out more about it at Daniel Short's website.
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@Alex

What about just English in England? Liverpudlian to West Country, the words, the pronunciation, slang and meaning change etc

I agree with Johnald. When we can translate whales chat and they can tell us about the Martians then I will believe. (2 intertubes for who guesses the book).
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Great! Now all we have to do is find some aliens to try it out on!
Most Americans don't even understand what their next-door neighbors are saying, who needs aliens?

E.T. did a pretty good job at speaking English. Maybe we can enlist him as a translator?
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WHAT the software programmer doesn't take into account
IF the structure remains the same but
THEY have a different way of looking at the world and
SPEAK in ways we've never encountered or make
STUPID reference we know nothing about (Darmak and Jilad)...
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I think a more principled objection can be made to this project: it's not just about the sounds aliens make, since structural similarities can be easily distinguished from sounds. A series of high-pitched beeps might be an easily decodable binary language. Nor is the issue about the phenomenology of the aliens and their interests.

The problem is that linguists since the 1950s have acknowledged that language-production is under-determined by environmental input, and have concluded that much of language consists of an innate 'universal grammar' that particular languages then fill in with their own syntax, lexicon, morphology, semantics, etc. This is all relatively uncontroversial.

Any species with a different evolutionary history will not share this 'universal grammar' unless there are very specific constraints on what language can possibly be. The '60 human languages' sampled here are all human languages, that is, languages sharing in the evolutionary history of the species.

Just as there are many ways to evolve sight (compound? lens? pinhole?) the innate linguistic structures of alien species may or may not have anything to do with ours. It's a neat idea, but we have no idea of how likely it is that linguistic evolution is constrained tightly enough that structures similar enough would have independently evolved.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar
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