So much “power”! ∞
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
There is an annoying trend in alternative medicine: the aggrandization of “the power of placebo” as a justification for therapy that can’t beat a placebo. Therapies that perform no better than placebo are now predictably spun as being “as good as placebo,” as though placebo is the new gold standard to meet. The absurdity of this inflation of the placebo currency becomes clear with a simple comparison: would you take a drug that had been proven to be “as good as a placebo”? Not a chance!