Placebo-Fu
“An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.” – Henri-Frédéric Amiel Ah placebo! Along with natural history and regression to the mean, it is one of the positive non-specific effects of...
“An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.” – Henri-Frédéric Amiel Ah placebo! Along with natural history and regression to the mean, it is one of the positive non-specific effects of...
He takes a bite of his bacon cheeseburger, “Medical providers don’t know how science works.” “Tell me about it!” I’m having dinner in a noisy sports bar in the Midwest with an applied mathematician with ties...
A common argument that I hear is, “Since pain is a subjective interpretation, who cares how it improves?” The reasoning goes that the pain is real to the patient, so if a treatment makes improvement...
“I see you have a deck of cards. Go ahead and shuffle them in any way you would like then hand me the deck.” You look at your deck of cards, a deck your...
“Often myths arise because a single claim or research finding has particular intuitive appeal. The claim makes sense, it supports a popular argument, and soon it is cemented as taken-for-granted fact even though its evidence base...
In The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen, the Emperor hires two weavers to make him a new suit of clothing. The weavers provide no actual clothes but swindle the Emperor by telling him that the “fabric” is...
Many times when I’m discussing placebo and specific effects, physical therapists will say, “The patient doesn’t care. They just want less pain. We should give them less pain even if it’s temporary and the treatment...
It has been said that medicine skipped The Enlightenment since it was already a fully established profession at that time. Where the likes of Newton, Hooke, Huygens, etc. evolved “Natural Philosophy” into the sciences of physics,...
Wisdom is the love of truth. Intelligence and spiritedness can exist without it. Without wisdom, if some proposition floods their sense of beauty, they will believe it with all their heart and soul, and...
Over the years I have learned to use sense of humor as a litmus test for critical thinking. When I meet someone who takes everything very seriously and lacks any kind of sense of...