The Browser - Placebos and Opium

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All Placebos Are Not Created Equal

Sam | All That Is Solid | 16th November 2021 | U

Clinical studies suggest that the placebo effect has become stronger over time in the United States: People are responding more positively to the idea of medical treatment, relative to treatment as such. In 1996 pain-relief drugs beat placebos by 27.3% in clinical trials. In 2013 the margin was down to 8.9%. It may get harder for new drugs to win FDA approval if placebos work almost as well (1,020 words)

📖: Milk Of Paradise, by Lucy Inglis

via Five Books | Best History Books of 2018

The entire history of opium, and the many different ways it was consumed – as morphine, heroin, OxyContin – from Neolithic times to the current opioid epidemic. The earliest evidence of its use as a narcotic or for pain relief was in Spain around seven millennia ago. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker were all shaped by it (480 pages)

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