Here's a big quote from Bad Science and Cheryl Morgan... Mind Over Matter
http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=1810 Think yourself thin?
http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/think-yourself-thin/
Alia Crum and Ellen Langer from Harvard psychology department took 84 female hotel attendants in 7 hotels. They were cleaning an average of 15 rooms a day, each requiring half an hour of walking, bending, pushing, lifting, and carrying. These women were clearly getting a lot of good exercise, but they didn?t believe it: 66.6% of them reported not exercising regularly, and 36.8% said they didn?t get any exercise at all.
Their health, measured by things like weight, body fat, body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio and blood pressure, was related to their perceived amount of exercise, rather than the actual amount of exercise they got... And it gets better. The researchers then divided the subjects into two groups. One of them got a series of lectures explaining to them how healthy their lifestyles were, and the other group did not. After four weeks the group that had received the lectures showed a marked increase in health... Now there's some research data which won't be popular. The Placebo Effect is the Rubric Elephant in the Room. I suspect that as components become acceptable and explainable, they get peeled off the Elephant and give nice respectable names. By definition, the Placebo Effect isn't a real effect, after all... (ED: Just another one of those Damned Things that that shameless aggitating fcuk Charles Fort was always moaning about...)
ED2: Paging Dr. Pan: Placebos Work Better in Children
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/08/paging-dr-pan-p.html
It's a strange finding nestled inside a weird phenomenon: children are 50 percent more likely than adults to respond favorably to placebos.
So concludes a Public Library of Science Medicine review by French pediatricians of anti-epilepsy drug studies. If replicated in other drugs, researchers may need to adjust their analyses of clinical drug studies involving kids.
What could account for the tendency of kids to feel better after taking a drug designed to do nothing? The reasons, write the researchers, "remain largely unknown and mostly speculative."
No surprise there: nobody knows why people, adults and children alike, are sometimes healed by placebos, which usually take the form of sugar pills. But it could involve the feel-good power of suggestion: if you think you're going to get better, you will... I don't read Wired, so no surprise I missed this one. I should stick it in my feeder...
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テルミンを演奏するネコ [The cat which performs theremin]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ONJfp95yoE
(This Awesome Awesomeness is care of the Awesomest ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) insomnius)
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(via insomnius)
Good night. It's been giggles.
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