posted
I scored a 17. The only transcendental thing I've experienced is music -- and what's so awesome about that is that music is a wholly human creation.
Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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The issue seems far from settled, though the effect is apparently not as powerful as was once thought.
edit:from the Times article:
quote: Professor Freedman said the statistical method the Danish researchers used, pooling data from many studies and using a statistical tool called metanalysis to examine them, could give misleading results.
"I just don't find this report to be incredibly persuasive," he said. "The evidence of a placebo effect is maybe a little bit less than I thought it was, but I think there's a big effect in many circumstances. This doesn't change my mind."
This brings to mind a question I have been wondering about: how valid are these meta-studies and metanalysis from a statistical point of view? In recent years I've seen this more often, an analysis of groups of previous studies, and I've wondered how effective a tool it is. At a superficial level it seems very powerful, yet also tricky to implement. I would appreciate comments from anyone who knows about metanalysis.
My 1st use of http://scholar.google.com/ , thanks to whoever posted about it at HR, it's a sweet search engine for research papers!
Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote: As compared with no treatment, placebo had no significant effect on binary outcomes, regardless of whether these outcomes were subjective or objective. For the trials with continuous outcomes, placebo had a beneficial effect, but the effect decreased with increasing sample size, indicating a possible bias related to the effects of small trials.
Whoo! Thanks for finding this, again, Morbo! I am glad to know I wasn't making that up. I'll remember to check google scholar in the future for stuff like this.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I'll remember to check google scholar in the future for stuff like this.
