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this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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Science Memes
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Man, imagine slowly dying of late-stage lung cancer, then getting picked to be in a trial for a drug that could greatly improve your situation, but you get put in the control group. Placebos will still cure cancer if you think they will, right?
Ironically placebos work so well in almost all cases that placebo results actually screw the data a bit. The human fucking mind is crazy yo
Similarly, the nocebo effect also works!
That's not really how trials for treatments like this work. The non-experimental groups would get standard of care/a comparator which would be used to determine efficacy. It would be unethical to give sugar pills to patients with advanced NSCLC.
Edit: yep https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12568215/
Placebo knee surgery literally works
That would be because we now know many cartilage related knee surgeries do not.
the effect is extremely real though, same with nocebo. They did a study a while ago, told people something was poison oak when it wasn't and rubbed them with it. They broke out in rashes.
Might be this one
Also, worked 30+ years in science and specifically a lot of immunology.
I'm not going to spend much time reading a LLM generated article from a source that pays people for surveys. In general, you are not wrong as far as placebo goes. Nocebo is just life.
The AMA has a section in their code of ethics about when and how to use a placebo in situations like this.
That's exactly what I was going to say!
"Your cancer is very advanced, and without intervention, you will be dead within the year. We're running a clinical trial on an experimental immunotherapy vaccine that can dramatically improve your outcomes. You're in the control group, here's a placebo."
It's important in case the drug that is being tested has unintended side effects, not having a control group means you have no idea if bad things are caused by the drug or by some other external factor (like medical history of the patients, environment...)
The control group probably isn't given placebo drugs, that probably wouldn't fly in most countries. Haven't looked into these specific trials and I'm not a medical professional!