From: Mike Wiliams [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 2:25 AM
To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
Subject: [tips] CHRONICLE: Are Psychiatric Medications Making Us Sicker?

>There is no evidence placebos have a biological basis.  They represent 
>cognition working full time to produce expected changes on self-report or 
>other-report dependent measures.

>My argument is that all the positive dependent measure changes, the effect 
>sizes from all these studies, are the result of expectation bias.  It is the 
>duty of the investigators to partial this out and prove that the treatments 
>are effective.  If this can't be done, then no one should claim that the 
>treatments have empirical support.


Although it's probably futile to do so, since you have beeen consistently 
ignoring all contrary evidence to your claims (e.g. all the people who have 
pointed out that many treatment studies include objective observational 
measures and manipulation checks), I'll point out here that there is a long 
history of demonstrated placebo effects on non-self-report measures, including:

heart rhythm
blood pressure
sensorimotor impairment
gastric acid secretion in ulcer patients
ACC, prefrontal, orbitofrontal, and amygdala activation
dopamine levels
immune system functioning
asthma symptoms
bronchitis symptoms
respiratory depression

Anyone with a basic understanding of classical conditioning can see how 
placebos could have such effects.
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