inside


Whiteboard
1.
Tests to do

2.
Ben's Article



Activities
1.
Teacher's Notes

2.
Student's Worksheets

3.
Background Notes
4.
Consent Form


The above links are a selection of PDF down load files for teaches and students.

Do You Believe Your Teacher?

From healing to sugar-coated capsules with no "active" ingredients, and from health food stores supplying various ointments and potions to maintain "well being" to a plethora of crushed up grasses and vines that really do make you feel on top of the world!



Perhaps this is a real scientific breakthrough, no more need for the pharmaceutical industry, but perhaps some of these claims are just a matter of what’s in our minds….
What the students had to say about this activity:

"I found it interesting how your mind can trick you!"

"I could tell it was decaffeinated coke by the taste!"

(From a pupil in the caffeinated cola group!)
"The reaction time tests were good fun"

"It was funny that I speeded up just because I thought I had to"

Further links:

Real research on the placebo effect by Professor Irving Kirsch (now at the University of Plymouth) can be seen in one of his scientific papers here .

Another point for discussion is the Nocebo effect . Nocebo is Latin for "I will harm", and is an ill effect caused by the belief that something is harmful.

For example, "…more than two-thirds of 34 college students developed headaches when told that a non-existent electrical current passing through their heads could produce a headache." See: The Skeptics Dictionary

And finally…

In one episode of the popular U.S. hospital drama, ER, the drug "Obecalp" was prescribed. This was none other than "placebo" spelt backwards… obviously the patient didn’t have a clue!
Check out the latest Guardian Bad Science articles here.



For some strange reason I’ve never understood, why pseudoscientists tend to get huffy when you suggest that their cash cow only works through the placebo effect.

Perhaps they were so distracted by their sea of flawed research into alternative therapies that they missed the excellent crop of good scientific studies on the placebo.

So we know that placebos can affect lots of things, especially stuff with a subjective component, like pain, or mood; and we know that two placebo sugar pills have a bigger effect than one, and that an intramuscular placebo injection is more effective than a placebo sugar tablet. But what grumpy alternative therapists miss is that placebo goes well beyond dishing out sugar pills: it’s the ceremony, and the cultural meaning of the treatment.



Confidently waving an ultrasound machine around someone’s face is effective for post-operative dental pain, regardless of whether the machine is switched on. Likewise, in the 1950s, we used to ligate the internal mammary artery to treat angina: but when someone did a placebo-controlled trial, going to theatre, making an incision, but only pretending to ligate the internal mammary, the sham operation was as effective as the real one.

Like morons, instead of applauding the power of the placebo, we just stopped doing the procedure, assuming that it was "useless".

It goes on: pinky red sugar pills are more effective stimulants than blue sugar pills, because colours have meanings.

And a four-way comparison, with either sugar pills or aspirin, in either unbranded aspirin boxes or mock-up packaging of the Dispirin brand, showed that brand-name packaging, and the wealth of advertising and cultural background material that packaging plays on, had almost as big an impact on pain as whether the pills had any drug in them.

So in some ways, it’s not irrational to believe that costly Nurofen is more effective than cheap unbranded ibuprofen, even if they’ve both got the same active ingredient.
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