The ‘placebo effect‘ is real enough, even if what causes it isn’t quite as clear as the result

According to a report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a study in the online journal PLoS Medicine reported that placebos, simple sugar pills with no medical qualities, were as effective as four brand-name antidepressants in treating mild to moderate depression. Needless to say, this research, which included data the drug companies never published, caused something of a stir (“A little good news: It’s all in your head”).

The report concludes:

Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.

So, even in severely depressed people, the benefits of medication surpassed those of the placebo mostly because they didn’t respond to ‘the placebo effect’, not because the medication was so much more effective. Since so-called double-blind trials, demanded by just about all government drug-licensing agencies, are based on showing that the drug produces results that the placebo does not, these finding raises some doubt about the quality of the initial research. Continued

It seems many big health advances rarely involve new medicines. Much the same applies to the rest of life too.

According to a study on the massive improvement in survival rates in cases of childhood leukemia, reported by Darshak Sanghavi (“Old Drugs, New Tricks”), it wasn’t some newly discovered drug or a magical genetic therapy that did the trick. It was due mostly to small but consistent improvements in the use of old drugs.

Research shows that the most successful areas of medicine don’t place too much emphasis on the latest miracle cures. Instead, they do the slow, boring work of reviewing thousands of published studies and clinical trials, imitating what works and adding their own experience and ideas to the growing body of knowledge available. Continued

It seems that thinking isn’t something that only happens inside your head

A recent article in The Boston Globe summarizes some of the current finding about the ways that our bodies and minds work together (“Don’t just stand there, think”). If these studies are correct, the relationship between what goes on inside the brain and what the rest of the body is doing may be far more important and complex than we imagined. That old image of the sage sitting in silent, unmoving contemplation might simply be wrong.

The English poet, Sir John Betjeman, explained that he went on long walks to work out his verses, which maybe explains why so many of his poems have the kind of rhythm you could march to. Edward Elgar bicycled through miles of countryside, seeking inspiration for his music. Now it seems that the intuitive link they found between bodily activity and mental processing is being proved by scientific experiments. Continued

If every stage in humanity’s development has a typical cause of death, ours may be the diseases of abundance

You might think that advances in medical knowledge, living standards and nutrition would mean that most people today — at least in the developed world — should be able to live out their full life-span. Longevity has increased on average, but I suspect that may be more due to better sanitation and the ability to deal routinely with medical situations that, in the past, would have meant almost certain death (such as infected wounds, appendicitis and complications in childbirth).

This would certainly be consistent with the idea that each stage of human development comes with its own set of death-causing problems or diseases — as suggested in this article by William Saletan in Slate magazine (“Saturated Fat: The genetic limits of obesity”). Continued

The importance of an ability to notice when someone isn’t saying what they mean

Detecting social cues from words and tone of voice is essential for successful dealings with others. It seems researchers are finally starting to understand the mechanism that lets us do this.

That’s the message from this article in The New York Times (“The Science of Sarcasm (Not That You Care)”). Researchers see sarcasm as evidence of the mental skill to figure out what others are thinking, even if they say the opposite. Now Dr. Kate Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal — irony, sarcasm, puns and jokes — requires the right hemisphere of the brain, not the left. Continued

According to neurologist Oliver Sacks it can

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeIn an article on Huffington Post (“The Healing Power Of Music”), Sacks is reported as saying: “Even with advanced dementia, when powers of memory and language are lost, people will respond to music.”

Oliver Sacks is a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, so what he says should carry some weight. He’s also a highly successful author, with books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales to his credit. Continued

Handling more with less effort may depend on how much green you see

I don’t mean the ‘folding green’ — money — I mean the real thing: plants and green leaves. That’s the conclusion of this article, Want More Productive Employees? Try Adding a Few Plants.

The author of a survey of office workers in Texas and the Midwest, Dr. Tina Marie Cade of Texas State University, found employees who worked in offices with green plants or views of green spaces felt better about their jobs and the work they performed:

Employees who worked near live interior plants or a window view of greenery reported significantly higher job satisfaction and thought far better of their bosses and coworkers than those who were confined to windowless gloom. The plant-exposed employees also considered themselves happier in life overall, while all of the respondents who said they were “dissatisfied” with their quality of life were plant-deprived—though it remains to be seen whether happier people are simply more likely to fill their offices with plants, as opposed to the plants providing the happiness.

It seems both women and men demonstrated more innovative thinking, generating more ideas and original solutions to problems in the office environment that included flowers and plants. Continued

I guess most of us have become used to the constant efforts by the media to induce mass hysteria over some minor topic. I had come to think of it as little more than marketing, on the basis that disaster stories always sell better than good news. Then I found this article by Robert Skidelsky and realized that such apocalyptic thinking has a very long history (“The apocalyptic mind”).

He says that, “classical apocalyptic thinking is certainly alive and well, especially in America, where it feeds on Protestant fundamentalism, and is mass-marketed with all the resources of modern media.” Even scientists are not immune, expressing probabilities as certainties and attacking dissent as some sort of heresy. Continued

Nowadays, we’re fairly used to the idea that people’s state of mind affects their physiology and biology. The ‘placebo effect’ happens when people believe something is doing them good, and report improvements accordingly, even though it’s just a sugar pill. In another study, patients told that their ‘treatment’ (another placebo) cost double the price of an alternative reported faster and better ‘healing’ as a result.

A report in the Canadian paper, The Globe and Mail, points to a Swedish study of whiplash injury patients as further evidence of the power of positive thinking (“Whiplash heals faster with positive thinking”).

For the study, the researchers recruited 1,000 Swedes who had recently suffered whiplash. The volunteers were asked to rate their chances of making a complete recovery. Six months later, they were given questionnaires to determine how much the lingering pain from the accident limited their daily activities, ranging from doing household chores to engaging in social activities.

“The lower their expectations [of getting better], the higher the disability,” said the lead author of the study, Lena Holm at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

Continued