Opinion: Listen: Sniffing out the power, and limits, of the placebo effect
Just in time for cold and flu season, the FDA says a popular decongestant is no better than placebo. But what if a placebo is still pretty good?
Have you ever taken phenylephrine for a stuffed-up nose and then felt better? If so, you might have been perplexed when Food and Drug Administration experts recently said that that the drug — which is in some versions of DayQuil, Sudafed, and other medicines — is no more effective than a placebo.
But to Michael H. Bernstein, an assistant professor of diagnostic imaging at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, it all makes sense. Bernstein says that “no better than a placebo” still means that it works, sort of. “If we expect to feel better, then we probably will,” he told me. And that complicates the idea of what medical treatment “works.”
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