placebo effect

Another week, another few hundred articles and blog posts scanned... here's this week's diverse group of stuff you may find particularly interesting. Hot on the heels of last week's post from Brian Massey naming Austin the Conversion…

Most businesses wouldn't question that it's a good idea to resolve problems quickly to prevent erosion of their reputaton, but many don't do a particularly good job of it. Even when it's too late to fix the actual problem, an apology…

Robert Burton of Salon wrote an interesting piece that discusses both the field of prescription drug marketing and how fMRI brain scans have been used to show that pain is "real." Fibromyalgia is a condition in which patients seem to…

Hot on the heels of learning that more expensive wine tastes better, we find that more expensive placebos are more effective at controlling pain:

We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an…