Making a positive claim (the latter) only sets yourself up to be discredited when, after some amount of time, one of the products inevitably is proven to work for something.
It's better to make the negative claim (the former) rather than risk losing what little authority you have with people who are struggling to understand the evidence behind these products to begin with.
Yeah, the former is a weak phrasing of the claim. The latter is too strong, though, to be scientifically precise. Better would be "overwhelming scientific evidence that this product does not work" or "the claims of this product have been tested false across hundreds of trials."
Which is to say, we're not 100% sure it's bullshit—we can't be, in science—but we're 99.999999% sure, or so.
I have some issues with the statement "No scientific evidence this product works". To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...
However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
> To me it is toothless and not very convincing. What if the product never has been tested scientifically? In that case, it might work...
> However, if a label would say "10 peer reviewed and published scientific studies find no evidence that this product works". Now that is convincing.
I don't think that this is how medical labelling should work. If you want to sell a product on the basis of its effect on your health, then the onus should be on you to prove that it works, not on others to prove that it doesn't. In this setting, I think that a presumption of guilt (ineffectiveness or harmfulness) until proven otherwise is appropriate.
"No scientific evidence this product works" does not mean the same thing as "this product does not work!" People confusing the two is very harmful.
It could mean, for example, "there is plausible mechanism of action but there hasn't been much research on the topic [for whatever reason]" or it could mean "there's absolutely no known mechanism of action, it doesn't make physiological sense, and a century of research has proved it doesn't work." These two statements are obviously not the same!
I don't see how that's convincing at all. To you and me who actually know a little bit about how science is supposed to work, sure. But to some Jane Doe who never took any science classes in college and has no idea what "peer review" is, and is taken in by the fluffy New-Age BS marketing on the product's label, that phrase isn't going to mean squat.
The fundamental problem I think is that much of society simply doesn't understand what science is, and why it's important, or why they should care about scientific studies in regard to allegedly medicinal products they may use.
In some contexts, you may be legitimately concerned only with the absolute level of "works" and not the level relative to a placebo baseline.
The (understandable, traditional) reason for measuring relative to placebo is that, "well, you don't need the drug if it's only as good as what a placebo gives -- just use the cheaper placebo! You should only bother with some special drug if it's better than what mere belief-in-effectiveness yields."
But that assumes that people are equally credulous of every placebo; if a person is more credulous of homeopathy, and credulity is hard to manufacture, then it's not quite wrong to say that it "works" under a relevant definition.
(I know this is kind of an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pen technicality, but eventually we'll want to actually understand why belief-in-effectiveness can matter at all, so we can exploit it, and reasoning like yours tends to give the idea that such an effort, by definition, can't work.)
it's not a "statistical quirk". The placebo effect is reproducible and appears to be something that biology "does". how this works is an open area of research but not one that is really studied in detail.
As far as I know, a placebo is all about symptoms and how a patient perceives them. When you take care of a patient and give him/her a pill, statistically the patient will report to have recovered quickly or suffered less. There might a body reaction where some hormone is released which blocks pain (http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/art...), but no direct action as a cure.
Ok, I'll be more specific: the reason why drug trials are placebo-controlled is that human body is already equipped with the most miraculous drug of all: our own immune system. So, to accurately measure effectiveness of the drug we have to benchmark it against effectiveness of immune system. Placebo effect is just our own body fighting disease, no mystical forces involved.
AFAIK, the "real" placebo effect is a very small and specific thing that goes on when pain alleviation or inflammation are experimental variables, because of the body's μ-opioid system.
The rest of the placebo effect, outside of that domain, is being increasingly found to be the result of under-powered experiments.
We can choose the argue about the scope of the effect (I think it goes beyond just pain and inflammation, and don't think it's limited to mu-opioids), but generally, yes, pain and inflammation are the two areas where the placebo effect has been seen to occur in a well-powered, well-controlled study.
