A Placebo a Day Keeps the Doctor Away
Do you comply with your doctor's orders? If you're on a daily medication do you always take it, every day, at the same time, with say the recommended glass of water? If you do, even if there's no medicine in the pill, your odds of living a long and healthy life are good and getting better and it's because you've made yourself the beneficiary of the compliance effect.
I was reminded of a recent study of the so-called compliance effect while reading "Secrets of the Centenarians" in today's NYTimes. In the Times piece the author examines the long life and sharp mind of Mrs Esther Tuttle and her particularly keen insight into the source of good health. She says:"If you respect what the doctors tell you to do, you can live a long life, but you have to do it. You can't ignore the advice."
Though currently inexplicable it turns out that people who follow their doctor's orders, even if it's just to take a sugar pill a day (they don't know it's a sugar pill, of course), do better than those who take a less disciplined approach to their health. The article of which I was reminded is: "The Relationship Between Bisphosphonate Adherence and Fracture: Is it the Behavior or the Medication? Results From the Placebo Arm of the Fracture Intervention Trial". In it the authors report the results of a study of the outcomes of those women on placebo in a drug trial for a drug designed to prevent bone loss (osteoporosis). Even though they didn't get any real medicine and even though they were on the same sugar pill as the women who didn't strictly adhere to their doctor's orders regarding the drug, those women who took their sugar pill religiously had significantly lower bone loss and fewer hip fractures.
This and other recent research on the compliance effect confirm what Mrs Tuttle somehow figured out: resolve (along with resourcefulness, resilience and a refusal to succumb to cynicism) somehow, some way, keeps you alive and keeps you healthy.
