file.newsgroup.med.58937 Maven / Gradle / Ivy
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From: [email protected] (Dick King)
Subject: Re: Selective Placebo
In article <[email protected]> [email protected] (ron roth) writes:
>
> OTOH, who are we kidding, the New England Medical Journal in 1984
> ran the heading: "Ninety Percent of Diseases are not Treatable by
> Drugs or Surgery," which has been echoed by several other reports.
> No wonder MDs are not amused with alternative medicine, since
> the 20% magic of the "placebo effect" would award alternative
> practitioners twice the success rate of conventional medicine...
1: "90% of diseases" is not the same thing as "90% of patients".
In a world with one curable disease that strikes 100 people, and nine
incurable diseases which strikes one person each, medical science will cure
91% of the patients and report that 90% of diseases have no therapy.
2: A disease would be counted among the 90% untreatable if nothing better than
a placebo were known. Of course MDs are ethically bound to not knowingly
dispense placebos...
-dk