Leaving the Land of Woo

Tags: placebo effect

We hear a great deal about the placebo effect, especially in discussions of alternative medicine.  Critics of alternative medicine point to the placebo effect as explaining the reported success of treatments that have no rational basis.  Despite there being no evidence that the alternative techniques are having any real effect, customers report that they feel better.  So what is the placebo effect, and how does it work?

Let's first describe some of the characteristics of this effect.  It was found out, back in the 50s, that if patients were told they were receiving real treatment when they were actually receiving fake treatment, they still reported feeling better.  In other words, simply the belief alone that they were receiving treatment, influenced patients to report an improvement in how they felt.

Tags: theory

When we are trying to explain something, typically we look for causes.  We are trying to relate what we know, to what seems to require explanation.  If we see a smashed flowerpot on the floor, we look for where it might have come from.  If it is outside, we'd look up to see if it might have come from the window ledge.  We do that because we are relating what we are trying to explain, to what we already know, and the window ledge is a possible source.  That's an important part of the explanation.

If we claimed that the flowerpot simply came into existence, already broken, on the floor, our explanation wouldn't be accepted because it didn't fit what we know of the world.  Things don't simply suddenly come into existence and disappear.  That's not something that happens in our world, so we do not accept it as a cause.

This point is very important because when we are looking for explanations, we have to be very careful to distinguish between when we are appealing to causes that we can demonstrate, and to those which we cannot.  An appeal to a cause that we cannot demonstrate, is not accepted as a cause at all - it would simply be another part of the account that needed further explanation.

So to be accepted as reasonable, we have to be able to demonstrate the effect of causes.  That's not an unusual statement because it's how we deal with the real world every day.  It's what provides us with a measure of control because identified causes give us predictable consequences.