Quote: (04-28-2014 06:35 PM)cardguy Wrote:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/04/...l-research
Quote:Quote:
"Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out. The effect appears to be due to scent molecules that male mammals (including humans, dogs, and cats) have been emitting for eons.
The finding could help explain why some labs have trouble replicating the results of others, and it could cause a reevaluation of decades of animal experiments: everything from the effectiveness of experimental drugs to the ability of monkeys to do math. Male odor could even influence human clinical trials."
Brother, why are you acting so surprised? The medical world has known about observer-based alterations in results for years.
It's called the placebo effect. The opposite is the nocebo effect.
The same effect on mice works on humans too. Some patients prefer to see female doctors, some prefer to see males; it's placebo, but it's real enough to have a measurable effect.
Even a doctor's demeanor can change the results of treatment. A pleasant bedside manner boosts a doctor's cure rate. An unpleasant doctor has more treatment failures. Even with exactly the same diseases using the exact same treatment.
Placebo also boosts the effect of medication. If you like me as a doctor, and I give you pain meds, then there is a boost in the power of the medications by about 30%. If you dislike me, then even if I give you the right treatment, the medication won't work as well, and may even fail.
You speak of this mice story like it's some sort of new, medical science destroying revelation, but
we already know about it. This is why the medical world tries to keep itself informed by doing randomised double-blind trials - to try to minimise observer-induced alterations in the results. (Note that in medical research trials, a consistent finding is that about 30% of the subjects in the placebo group still have active improvement in their disease).
One quick and amazing example - I read a paper on an experiment done with a powerful painkiller. Basically the researchers gave this painkiller to a bunch of anaesthetists, but told them that it was a placebo drug, and that it had no active ingredient, but could they give it anyway as they were collecting research data for a trial. So the anaesthetists gave this painkiller, thinking it was a placebo, and the stuff consistently failed to work, despite being a good medication. Then the researchers repeated the experiment, this time giving a placebo but lying about it and telling the anaesthetists that it was a painkiller drug - and it worked about 30% of the time! For the worst kind of pain imaginable - the pain of being operated on!
The reason I'm giving you the above example is that it was good evidence and also a good example of the existence of observer-induced alterations in medical results. Just the beliefs and confidence of the doctors giving the medication was enough to alter the outcome.
Medicine is not a science, rather it is an art informed by science; as such a good doctor, in my opinion, must constantly be aware of the limits of science and must work to develop the artistic side of medicine: good bedside manner, good listening skills, uplifting conversational skills, calm and happy manner, negotiation skills, clinical intuition, clinical examination, brainstorming, thinking out of the box, and various other soft skills I've so internalised that I've forgotten I have them.