The drugs don't work, they just make you worse

[venta]

So... we still have no government, so I still have a cough. On the way to work this morning, I bought some cough mixture - said cough isn't particularly painful, but it is noisy and I thought I ought to make the attempt not to irritate my colleagues.

Actually, I seem to have irritated them anyway, because they're all wildly indignant that I paid for cough mixture when "it doesn't work". I'm vaguely aware that there have been news stories claiming that cough mixture was ineffective, but am vague on the details. It certainly appears to have made some difference. I bought the least expensive bottle available in Boots this morning and its ingredients list doesn't include "placebo", so it can't be that.

Anyway, I am mildly outraged by my cough mixture. It is a sort-of branded, sort-of ownbrand affair, being somehow "Boots Nirolex Chesty Cough relief Linctus". The capitalisation is theirs.

Firstly I was outraged because the box didn't contain a spoon. Don't you even get a free spoon these days ? Admittedly, sensible grown-ups with medicine cabinets don't need another spoon, so I suppose it reduces waste. However, as an immature type who hasn't bought liquid medicine in years I found myself in the unfortunate position this morning of swigging it out of the bottle. And it was rather nasty. More outrage. I always expect cough mixture to be nice. Junior Benelyn was (when I was a kid) lovely stuff - more or less worth having a cold for.

Anyway. Swigging from the bottle, as it turns out, meant I didn't realise until just now how quite how outraged I was. Post lunch, I thought it was about time for another dose so used the small purple pottery spoon which lives on my desk. Pouring the gloopy stuff out... I realised it was clear. Transparent. Totally colourless.

Everyone knows that cough mixture should be red. Or brown. Maybe reddish brown. Possibly - on appeal - yellow if it's that buttercup stuff. But colourless ?

No wonder it doesn't bloody work.

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I had a conversation about this once which went:

My interlocutor: "I was thinking of buying this flu remedy, but I looked it up and it's no better than placebo."

Me: "That's fine. Placebos work incredibly well on mild pain and discomfort symptoms like flu. That's why saline injections outperform sugar pills as painkillers."

MI: "But if I don't believe it'll work, then it won't."

Me: "That's why I'm pointing out that the science proves it does work. Rationally, you should believe that it will work."

I don't think my argument prevailed, but then the stuff was probably 20 times more expensive than an ibuprofen and a bit of a lie down, so maybe I should have pitched that.

The relevance to cough mixture being, if the placebo performs as well as the standard treatment, take the placebo even if it is just a sugar pill. Bohr's horseshoe, and all that. We don't need doctors to lie to patients, we just need patients with a bit of imagination.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, it's considerably easier to buy cough medicine than it is to buy placebo syrup.

At least, I thought it was - several people have now made suggestions of where I can acquire placebo syrup from. Though, to be honest, given that it's probably still harder to acquire the placebo, unless it's substantially cheaper, I might as well carry on taking the no-better-than-placebo over-the-counter medicine :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Sure, but you *know* that cough-medicine is as effective as placebo. If you try to improvise your own placebo, you might not get the good stuff. I think cuthbertcross's jargon is the right way to go, though. If a pharmacist is willing just to sell you that, perhaps with a side-order of raised eyebrows, then you're done.

Once you have the choice between the medicine and the correct placebo, then it's a cost issue rather than an efficacy-of-treatment issue.

Of course if you can convince yourself that the placebo used in the literature was a cup of tea and a biscuit, you're even better off.