Sugar Pills More Potent Than Ever
Wired has a new article about the placebo effect and evidence that placebos are becoming more increasingly more potent.
Years ago I was thinking about going to medical school and so hung on every word from a friend's father when he talked about what he did for a living. I remembered being fascinated by his stories about sugar pills and the patients to whom he prescribed them. He said that he'd learned years before that for some patients, the ones without any objective signs of treatable illness, he did his best work by being part priest and part witch doctor.
He'd listen to their stories, affirm their suffering, advise them to live better, forgive them their faults and prescribe powerful new magic - "penta-methyl-tri-something-or-another-cis-this-and-that". And it worked. He and his pharmacist friend had to be creative though as patients would compare pills and often return to demand stronger magic citing a neighbor's far milder symptoms. So they wound up having a number of different sugar pills in varying shapes and sizes. I don't recall him saying much about color other than that one lady, upon discovering that she'd been prescribed a very large red and white pill, returned to the office to say that she wasn't nearly as sick as the doctor apparently thought she was.
So what does this have to do with mass torts? Well, particularly in the realm of adverse effects from the use of psychotropic drugs, there's a huge risk of (or opportunity for) getting the causation arrow pointed in the wrong direction especially when so little is known about the causes of mental and emotional disorders and the mechanisms by which they are alleviated. After all, trial lawyers thrive in conditions of uncertainty.
