BBC article on animal placebo effect

The BBC has an article on the placebo effect in animals: Why animals experience the placebo effect much like we do

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Again, this would imply the animal itself is not experiencing a placebo effect. If anything, it is the pet owner who might be responding to the placebo. The owner who anxiously monitors their pet throughout its time in the trial might in fact be helping the pet get better. It is certainly something that can affect the animal's convalescence that is not down to the drug being tested in the trial.

Those of us who have followed the debates here about homoeopathy will find few surprises here, apart from the fact that a mainstream news media actually gets it right!

One thing was new to me, and that was that you could train mice to expect an active chemical that assisted their immune response when they tasted sweet water, and then remove the active chemical, but the sweet water would still assist the immune response of the mice. This is the exact same situation as human placebo effects, but this does not cause the journalists to promote veterinary homoeopathy:

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"Even if research somehow proves that there is a Pavlovian response or conditioning response [to a treatment], is it going to be more significant than giving proper painkillers, if the animal needs that?" Chambers says. "If you've got a painful condition, is it fair to rely on the possible Pavlovian response because the animal used to be treated with a real painkiller but now you're giving it a placebo? It's probably unfair to assume that." Instead, Chambers advocates applying the same rules used in human medicine when treating animals. If there is a conventional treatment available that has been shown to work, that is what should be used.

Amen!

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2eizfrs