I guess I never understood placebo trials in a lot of medical situations. Like what we are discussing here, a "revolutionary cancer drug", why even bother letting people die giving them placebos? Its cancer. Its not like you can placebo effect the cancer away. You don't need a double blind trial to see if the drug stops the cancer, you just give people the drug and observe the cancer! I feel like our medical system is pretty wack. Or maybe I'm entirely wrong and you can placebo cancer away.
That is not how randomised controlled trials in conditions like cancer work. They are almost always a riff on new drug + current best treatment regime vs current best regime. Sometimes a drug within a regime is swapped with the new agent and the two compared in terms of survival and toxicity.
Progress in cancer treatment is almost always achieved by incremental tweaking of how we treat it. There are a few revolutionary agents based on specific disease mechanisms in certain cancers (e.g. imatinib [1]) but these are in the minority - cancer is protean.
A cold takes 7 days to resolve on its own. With modern medicine, it will take merely a week !
The placebo is not to eliminate the cancer, it’s to guarantee that we know the “normal” path without the drug, and gives a comparison point between the control and the target. The fundamental problem is that cancer can just resolve/improve on its own, or rather without intervention… so just poking and watching isn’t sufficient proof of the drug’s efficacy
Yet it's so hard to have a good intuition about that. We're wired to think in terms of action and agency and be morally judged on its basis. This is deeply rooted in human psychology and acts as a foundation for many of our behaviours, from religion to vaccine hesitancy.
Ask anybody I'd they think it's more likely that a disease just went away on its own or if there was some reason, "something".
Most people will tell it's more likely something happened, a miracle of some kind for some reasons. Deep down there is always a reason for things to happen, but "your cells in your body did a good job" just doesn't sound right.
Even when people accept the idea that the body can fix itself pretty well, they tend to swing the pendulum too much and assume the body can do just anything .... provided you do (agency) the right motions (potions, talismans, right diet, right prayers...)
