How powerful is the placebo effect?
Another quite micro post (really, I’m serious about this micro thing), but a bit more to chew on than the last: How powerful is the placebo effect? Not very.
This 2010 meta-analysis of studies involving the placebo effect suggests that its perceived power may really be mostly in our heads. In fact, it may not exist at all in the physical sense that many believe it does.
That confirms my bias. I’ve been banging this drum for ages. He’s summarizing Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche — which I do myself in a much longer article about placebo, just updated.
99 words, boom, done!