I am, I’ve been told, a devious person. Not so much in my daily life, but certainly when it comes to convenience in the home. Take, for example, the “secret ingredient” that I would add to milk in order to get my young children to consume their allotment of calcium. I would take their glass, disappear down the hall to where I kept my stash, and return with a glass of milk with an improved flavor. It took a surprisingly long time for these otherwise very bright and observant kids to catch on the fact that I added nothing to the glass.
Another instance of this type of underhanded scheme would come to the fore when one or the other kid would start their organ recitals: “My head hurts. My knee hurts. My toes hurt.” At this point, we would again go to our secret compartment and add a placebo to the children’s drinks. To be fair, we were totally honest with them. When they asked what we they were being given, we told them it was “a placebo.” Again, it took a shockingly long time before they finally understood exactly what a placebo was. When confronted with our deception, we simply pointed out that we never lied.
Today I read in the New York Times that some entrepreneurs are now cashing in on this idea, and are marketing placebo pills. There are a surprisingly large number of objections to this, some from the scientific side:
But some experts question the premise behind the tablets. “Placebos are unpredictable,” said Dr. Howard Brody, a medical ethicist and family physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. “Each and every time you give a placebo you see a dramatic response among some people and no response in others.”
He added that there was no way to predict who would respond.
“The idea that we can use a placebo as a general treatment method,” Dr. Brody said, “strikes me as inappropriate.”
whereas other worry about the long term consequences:
Dr. Geller, the bioethicist, agrees that parents should not deceive their children. But she added that a parent who truly believed in the power of the placebo was not really being deceptive. “In principle,” she said, “I don’t have a problem with the thoughtful use of placebo. The starting premise and your own belief about what you’re doing matters a lot.”
As for me, I’m only angry that I didn’t think of marketing this first. Interestingly, they are calling the product Obecalp, which is placebo spelled backwards. Unless kids have gotten more clever in recent years (a possibility I am not willing to discount out of hand), this seems unnecessarily complicated.
Isn’t Obecalp for dyslexics?
Left by Lex Luthor on May 27th, 2008