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.)
The same thing happened when they let people see the price tags of the wine they were drinking.
ReplyDeleteAlso 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.
TVD, can I just agree with you on this?
ReplyDeleteOn 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.
“When you’re expecting pain relief, you’re secreting your own opioids,” Dr. Ariely added.
ReplyDeleteHe'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.