Placebos are dangerous!
What a bold statement, right?
Let me explain how I mean it.
A placebo is a substance or treatment with no active therapeutic effect. - Wikipedia
While this should be common knowledge by now, one important aspect is often overlooked.
- I'm not talking about direct physical harm, caused by substances a placebo pill may contain. The placebos I'm talking about contain too low a dose of anything to have a direct effect either way, positive or negative.
- I also don't mean the financial downside, as you're paying high prices for basically nothing.
There are obvious scams by snake oil salesmen and also less obvious ones by esoterics, who may or may not believe in the advertised effect themselves, selling homeopathical medicine, pills, drops and alike. But that's an ethical issue that I won't go into further. - The danger I'm talking about is, when people rely on placebos and as a result of that start real, scientifically proven, effective treatment too late, if ever. So using placebos can have the same consequences as not treating an illness at all. Depending on the nature and the severity of the disease, this can be a fatal mistake.
Let's take an extreme example:
- Imagine you're diagnosed with intestinal cancer.
- You defy conventional medical treatment, proven to work on millions of people, if diagnosed and treated early enough.
- For whatever reason - maybe you read an article about it on a trustworthy website, maybe your grandmother told you a secret cure she heard about, maybe your religion or culture forces you - you decide to use alternative medicine.
To demonstrate the absurdity even further, let's use another example of pseudo treatment: You go to the local witch doctor and let him perform a ritual dance for you. In a pompous ceremony he exorcises the evil demons responsible for your desease from your body. - A few months after the placebo / pseudo treatment, you start feeling worse and worse. Is your first thought, after realizing that the therapy's outcome was not as expected, "Gimme my money back, you filthy witch doctor"? No, you're slowly dying and you search for ways to survive. In a state of despair, you even lose your principles and turn to conventional medicine for help.
- The doctors tell you that the cancer has spread to the point where no chemotherapy or surgery can cure you anymore. If you had decided for the correct treatment initially and started it in time, you could have been cured, but now it's too late. The cancer has reached the terminal stage.
While the case in this story was a rather extreme one, things like that happen all the time. Maybe in smaller dimensions with less severe consequences...like not treating / pseudo treating foot fungus, letting it spread and making it harder to treat. Or like using placebos against tonsillitis, resulting in a variety of complications.
I hope you get my point and that I could raise awareness about the issue.
paint.net drawing by yours truly
At a certain degree of ugliness you can start calling it art
Sources: My open mind, life experience, self studies, Dr. Google and Wikipedia ;-)
Help me out using these referral links
- busy.org - the largest and most feature-rich alternative to Steemit
- Get more followers with SteemEngine
My videos and live streams
I'm not really active there, but if you wanna check out my old content:
twitch.tv/spreadfire1
youtube.com/spreadfire
My top articles:
Travel / Story
Freedom, Friends and Love. A 600 km Roadtrip to Italy
Photography / Story
Happy Easter (in a non-religious sense)
How to: Use your Android device as camera with OBS