Originally published at: New erectile dysfunction drug: "possibly the first time in history that a company has knowingly commercialized a placebo" | Boing Boing
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Ignoring all those companies that sell homeopathic medicine, obviously?
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Maybe not…
And waddya know, now there’s a new use for Head On!
(Maybe they should reverse the two words in its name first.)
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I am not looking forward to the rebooted commercials.
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A physician friend just recounted a visit with a new patient. The person was clearly a hypochondriac, listing a litany of bizarre, and self-contradictory, maladies. When my friend asked what he’s done in the past about these issues, the patient immediately responded that his previous doctor wrote him a prescription for what he called “Plackabo”. He had to repeat it a couple of times before my friend picked up on what he meant.
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thanks, i’ll stick to cocaine.
(i’m kidding, i don’t have genitals.)
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Yes, that should help.
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Well, you could use it as a suppository, perhaps the added pressure on your prostate could lead to improved erectile function.
Couldn’t hurt to try.
(Or it might, depending on the size of the pill.)
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The secret is getting really attractive pharmaceutical researchers to administer the placebos.
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but there are so many other substances out there that do the exact thing! and the vast majority of them do not need FDA approval.
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Acupuncture, reiki, tt, half or more of chiropractic, anything with quantum in it that doesn’t also involve a medical physicist
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Huh? What is this post even on about? Companies market nonsense as medicine all the time, and this is more of the same. All of alternative medicine is exactly “commercializing placebos knowingly”. Did Discover magazine just fall off a turnip truck?!
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Is this an Rx for foreplay?
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I wonder if they meant “possibly the first time a pharmaceutical company knowingly commercialized a placebo”? At least these quacks claim to be a real pharmaceutical company rather than a company selling homeopathic remedies/herbal supplements/etc.
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The pharmaceutical companies figured out how much money there is in woo a while back. Many of the major vitamin and supplement brands are owned by Pfizer, HGGC, Bayer, et. al. Pfizer, for example, makes big bucks selling Emergen-C, the citric acid packets that people think have anything to do with preventing or curing colds. There’s big bucks in wearing out peoples’ kidneys and making expensive pee, it turns out.
So, still trying to be generous to the story, maybe it’s the first nonsense thing marketed under the brand of a science-based company? Now we’re getting really tortured into rhetorical knots.
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I think the active ingredient is the one that isn’t included: The rubbing in.
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“Our scientists [lab coat] have warned us that our placebo is so strong that taking more than the prescribed amount could leave one permanently duped”
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I found this all very confusing, so I looked up their description of the study:
I think that what makes this case so unusual is that the treatment being market as MED3000 was used as the placebo control in a study for another candidate treatment (topical formulations of GTN, which is a vasodilator and kind of a “this sounds like it should work!” candidate for an ED treatment). The study showed that the placebo worked, so they’re marketing it.
Also, it seems like the study treated it as a medical device rather than a pharmaceutical. Maybe because it’s topical?
Also, GTN is glyceryl trinitrate, which most people call nitroglycerin.
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