Wednesday, March 05, 2008

No Need For Lower Drug Prices...

...expensive placebos work better!

So no more of your sniveling liberal crap, o.k.?

(More precisely: among subject who were given placebos, but who thought they were new prescription pain pills, those who were told the pill was more expensive rated it as being more effective.)

3 Comments:

Blogger Tom Van Dyke said...

The same thing happened when they let people see the price tags of the wine they were drinking.

Also on the snake-oil front, there's an unholy alliance between New Age [pronounced "newage," rhymes with "sewage," per the great skeptic Penn Gillette] types and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), whose state manufactures the half-zillion useless "supplements" that generate a half-zillion dollars a year outside the FDA's [and FTC's] purview.

I bet you have a shelf in the kitchen filled with 3/4 full bottles of all sorts of placebos.

Well, I do at least. If you don't, good on you.

Regardless, the American consumer is being ripped off bigtime, well below the radar. They used to run these people out on a rail with a new coat of tar and feathers, but today, it's sort of a religious freedom issue.

7:56 PM  
Blogger lovable liberal said...

TVD, can I just agree with you on this?

On the wine, while I didn't like three-buck chuck from Trader Joe's, I'm a big fan of $10 California cabernets. It's easy to spend $30 and get something worse.

10:54 PM  
Blogger lovable liberal said...

“When you’re expecting pain relief, you’re secreting your own opioids,” Dr. Ariely added.

He's a behavioral economist. Does he know this from his own research or from the literature, or is he speculating? Hmm.

Still an interesting story.

9:23 PM  

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