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+--- Thread: Article 5 ways ‘honest’ placebos can help + Social scientists should embrace chaos theory (/thread-16762.html)
5 ways ‘honest’ placebos can help + Social scientists should embrace chaos theory - C C - Nov 1, 2024
Five ways ‘honest’ placebos can help
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/five-ways-honest-placebos-can-help
INTRO: Placebos can be powerful tools for treating anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. But the assumption that the patient must be deceived into believing that they are getting an active treatment, rather than an inert drug, means that some medical practitioners feel it is unethical to use them.
These practitioners may be pleased to hear that there's growing evidence that 'honest', 'open-label', and 'non-deceptive' placebos can work, too. In these studies, patients are usually told that they are not being given an active drug, but that there's evidence it might help anyway. According to some recent findings, this honest approach can (in certain cases) be as effective as deception... (MORE - missing details)
Social scientists cling to simple models, with disastrous results. They should embrace chaos theory.
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-16750-post-67356.html#pid67356
EXCERPTS: The core principle of the theory is this: chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. That means these systems are fully deterministic but also utterly unpredictable. As Poincaré had anticipated in 1908, small changes in conditions can produce enormous errors.
[...] In the mid-20th century, researchers no longer sought the social equivalent of a physical law (like gravity), but they still looked for ways of deriving clear-cut patterns within the social world. ... in the 1980s and ’90s, when cheap and sophisticated computers became new tools ... Suddenly, social scientists – sociologists, economists, psychologists or political scientists – could take a large number of variables and plug them into statistical software packages ... to help explain how groups of humans change over time. A quantitative revolution was born.
[...] There is just one glaring problem: our social world isn’t linear. It’s chaotic...
[...] The deeply flawed assumptions of social modelling ... persist because economists and political scientists [...have...] not ... meaningfully updated for decades. It is true that some significant improvements have been made since the 1990s. ... However, these approaches can’t solve many of the lingering problems of tackling complexity and chaos....
[...] The drawbacks ... mean that social research often has poor predictive power. ... We produce too many models that are often wrong and rarely useful. ... Social scientists should be drawing on these innovations from complex systems and related fields of research rather than ignoring them....
RE: 5 ways ‘honest’ placebos can help + Social scientist should embrace chaos theory - Syne - Nov 1, 2024
(Nov 1, 2024 03:19 PM)C C Wrote: These practitioners may be pleased to hear that there's growing evidence that 'honest', 'open-label', and 'non-deceptive' placebos can work, too. In these studies, patients are usually told that they are not being given an active drug, but that there's evidence it might help anyway. According to some recent findings, this honest approach can (in certain cases) be as effective as deception... (MORE - missing details)
The simple action of being proactive in one's own condition can be more powerful than most people realize.