Friday Placebo Book Report: In Which I Read an Inert Substance...

I didn’t read a book this week because I’ve been studying my nutrition text and it is long and I take notes the old-fashioned way (My kid said, “What are you doing?”  I said, “Copying out the chapter learning objectives, writing out the vocabulary definitions, and taking chapter notes.”  He said, “Whoa!  You actually do all that stuff they tell you to do in school.  I didn’t think anybody actually did that!”) because it works for me.  However, because reading leads to thinking (“A dangerous pastime!”), I found myself wondering about placebos.

My other kid, handily enough, is a librarian, so when my personal internet search skills fail, I call him in to find out what I want to know; this is the privilege I get for having taken him to the library in the first place.

I had two main questions.  The first one was about the inactivity of placebos.  I’ve been reading in a variety of places and experimenting on my own bodily chemistry set (not scientifically valid, but personally useful) about sugar, so the use of “sugar pills” as placebos made me wonder how the decision was made that a substance had no effect.  It turns out that not having an effect is not important; it is not having an effect on the condition in question.

The second one was about placebos and exercise research.  The gold standard for research is a double-blind study in which neither the experimenters nor the subjects know who is in the experimental group and who is in the control group.  It is challenging not to know whether we are exercising or not, so I wondered if some smart people had figured out a way around it.  The answer is no.  What tends to happen is that several groups of people with whatever condition are randomly assigned to an exercise group (or one of several exercise groups) or a control group “waiting list.”

At this point, everyone may be wondering why I even care.  I believe in science, but it has to be good science, well-conducted, ethical, and verifiable.  We all need to think about how science is made and use our critical faculties to evaluate the claims and assumptions embedded in our science.  This makes us smarter and less likely to be hoodwinked by those who would like to exploit us.