Studying the Placebo Effect: A Study in Top Down Narrative Control

Many years ago I was pursuing my Master's degree in Sociology when I thought I had come up with a brilliant idea for my thesis. I wondered why the Placebo effect itself was rarely if ever studied. I was teaching methodology to Sociology 101 students so I was well aware of how to design a good research study. I thought I had a real winner. In my youthful naivete I overlooked the behemoth pharmaceutical industry that I was inadvertantly aligning against.

My study design was simple and could be replicated easily against any number of variables. I wanted to recruit a small group of broke college students for "an investigatonal study about social anxiety." Drug research studies often targeted University students to be their guenea pigs so such an advertisement would be well received. I choose social anxiety specifically because it is extremely  common especially in college aged students. There also is no objective blood test that identifies it, much like other psychiatric conditions such as depression.

So I wanted this group of recruits to think they were going to be in a drug study. I would then have them sign legal paperwork recognizing that they might be part of the Placebo group, i.e. the control group that gets a sugar pill or some other inert substance. In reality everyone was going to get a placebo. What I wanted to study was the Placebo effect itself.

I planned to measure before and after results with a simple self reported questionnaire on a variety of anxiety provoking situations such as worry about a big exam or seeing your crush at a party. My actual variant was going to be the race, age and sex of the "researchers" conducting the interviews and administering the"medicine."                  

Would college students report less social anxiety if the person who gave them the Placebo was an older white man versus a younger black woman? What would change depending on the token incentive amount for study participation, if any? There were so many things that could be studied here, all in the science of belief.

My Master's professor nixed it immediately. It would be unethical to not give anyone a "real" drug, she argued. I told her back that every real drug study had a placebo group and that everyone would sign paperwork acknowledging that they might be part of it.

My professor implied a few other things including that my study could induce trauma on participants and that any such study needed to be through medical research, not Sociology. She heavily pressed me to write my Master's thesis about teen pregnancy, which I had written about before. I told her that teen pregnancy rates had been dropping for years so I had difficulty coming up with an argument for the compelling need for the US Government to fund my grant proposal for such research.

A few days later the chair of the Sociology department dropped it on me. I could not do my placebo study because there was absolutely no money to be made. Pharmaceutical companies had a vested interest in ignoring the Placebo effect. I ended up dropping out of the Master's program with only an incomplete thesis left. I still wonder where the world would be if we went back to real science. Hopefully we do soon. Where we're at now can best be classified as "the operation was successful, but the patient is dead."