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PLACEBO: THE MIRACLE DRUG
By Dr. Andrew Saul
"The placebo should not be given on demand or for unduly
prolonged periods of time." (Jonothan G. Solomon, M.D. [1982]
Placebo revisited: An update on a very useful agent. The Consultant.
December).
Don't you just love that statement? Exactly how many patients
abuse their placebo prescriptions? And just how many people die
from placebo overdose? Ever since I first watched comedian Steve
Martin do a Saturday Night Live routine about being "high
on a new drug called Pla-cee-bo," I've questioned the scientific
method a lot more often. The great majority of all illnesses
are self limiting. About ninety percent of all sick people will
either get better anyway or die anyway, no matter what the doctor
does. So why have doctors? For the ten percent who need intervention,
common sense would tell us. Just how much bias enters into medical
practice? In so-called double blind studies, where neither experimenter
nor subject know who got the active medicine and who got the
sugar pill, there can be little doubt. Yet only about twenty
percent of all medical and surgical procedures have ever been
double-blind, placebo tested. Let's see if we've got this straight:
Only ten percent can be helped, and only twenty percent of what
will be tried is known to help. I haltingly say that twenty percent
of ten percent is..., ah, is... is a small number.
As a visiting student at the Canberra Hospital in Australia,
I attended a physician's seminar on a brand new treatment for
migraine headache. The seminar was paid for by the drug company
that, surprise surprise, made the very drug being reported on.
Research on this particular medicine showed that it worked better
than placebo. About 55 to 65% of patients taking it had relief,
whereas only about 45% taking the placebo had relief. Consider
the wonder of the real difference: 45 of one hundred had relief
from thinking that they might possibly be taking an effective
medication, whereas only 20 out of a hundred more actually got
relief from definitely ingesting the active chemical. When we
do placebo controlled, double blind studies, the pony to bet
on is the sugar pill: it will be infinitely safer, unbelievably
cheaper, and darn near as effective as the drug du jour.
Why, then don't we just go whole hog and just use placebos? Well,
we have. In a little-publicized (and downright embarrassing)
chapter of 19th century medical history, there was a movement
among some physicians who had good reason to believe that the
cures of the day were worse than the diseases. The very term
"quack" was in fact first applied to medical doctors
who gave their drug of choice, mercury, for almost anything.
They were called "quicks," actually, for using "quicksilver,"
mercury's nickname. Some doctors rebelled against what we today
would consider to be bona fide medical barbarism, such as bleeding
by the pint, uterus removals for female hysteria, lower rib removals
in woman so they could fit into corsets better, arsenic treatments
for syphilis, and so forth.
So along come some dissident doctors who choose to give no medicines
at all, just placebos. Their cure rate was high, their death
rate unusually low, their popularity with patients very strong,
their names today very much unsung. Just try to find information
about them at you local medical library or museum. If you come
across anything on this subject, please email links, articles
and especially references to: drsaul@doctoryourself.com
Reprinted with permission from the DOCTOR YOURSELF NEWSLETTER,
(Vol 1, No 16) copyright c 2001 by Andrew W. Saul. Subscriptions
are free at http://www.doctoryourself.com
About 90% of patients who visit doctors have conditions
that will either improve on their own or that are out of reach
of modern medicine's ability to solve." (New England Journal
of Medicine, Feb 7, 1991) It makes one wonder how many people
get better because of medical treatment and how many in spite
of it!
To better understand the politics of cancer go to: http://www.members.shaw.ca/cancerconspiracy |
