...because we may be prescribed what's essentially a placebo and it seems to work and we don't know that it was a placebo. The claim that 'placebos don't work on me' seems like a hard claim to verify.
FFS. If you're prescribed a medicine and it doesn't work, then if it was a placebo, it didn't work. Not hard to verify at all. A drug that doesn't work isn't going to be any less effective than a placebo. Placebos are not 100% effective. We know this because we can identify when they don't work.
If you give me a sea-band and tell me it is "powered by placebo", and it doesn't do shit, then the placebo doesn't work. That's even easier to figure out.
Also taking the line that "Nothing works on me unless I understand the mechanism" is kind of obtuse, considering that the article we are commenting on is about a device that relieves motion sickness, where even the inventor doesn't make any claims to know the mechanism by which they relieve the sickness. This may be the placebo effect, of course.
It is not my understanding of the mechanism that makes a drug work. It is my understanding of the mechanism that I use to justify giving money to a company that offers a product to me.
If a product is being sold to treat motion sickness, it damn well better be able to do that via some actual fucking mechanism. If your standards aren't that high, then perhaps I should get into the snake oil business. Seems I'm surrounded by suckers.
