the placebo effect is way too ofen being used as some kind of scapegoat in my opinion. Anything you want to debunk(without debunking anything)?..resort to placebo.

I think it is odd that people think that there is any such thing as "objective" evidence of anything. Objective evidence is technically impossible given that your reading about it, the manufacture of it, and everything in between are all clearly subjective.

In the fields of logic and epistemology, this is rather well known. Science, despite wanting to seem authoritative, even when it is genuine, is all quackery to some extent because it relies on induction... which can prove absolutely nothing. The only thing in science that can said to be a proof is in the field of mathematics... and then only if you do the proof yourself... and then only in that moment when you have done the proof. There is no evidence that the laws of nature even remain the same from day to day. We have had mounds of evidence that the constants people assume to be steady fluctuate like mad... including the speed of light and the gravitational constant. http://www.sheldrake.org/experiments/constants/

So, subjective evidence is all we have. Like it or not, we have no choice but to base our beliefs on our own subjective experiences.

As for the constant yammering here about clinical trials and objective evidence... it is basically wishful thinking. Clinical trials don't even claim to be objective. They are paid for by corporations and people with financial interest in the outcome. In case you missed it, thousands of pharmaceutical clinical trials were called into question back in 2010, and must be considered invalidated due to widespread abuse of the lax controls around the placebos being used. http://www.naturalnews.c...cebo_medical_fraud.html

Most of you know that a medicine must only be 5% more effective than a placebo to get FDA approval. Well, it turns out that 92% of "clinical" trials never mention what their placebo actually is... and there are no rules on it. They can use sugar pills as the placebo in a diabetic drug test... and do. They have used hydrogenated fats as a "placebo" in heart medicine trials. Naturally, water would 5% more effective than these placebos.

And let us not even bring up the moral implications of purposefully injuring and perhaps even killing your test subjects in the sole interest of pushing through a drug that probably doesn't work. (hence the need to stack the deck with fake placebos)

Please, my lovely scientifically oriented brethren, don't get so swept up in your enthusiasm for science that you forget to be critical. Whereas most of you seem to think that questioning psuedoscience is the totality of critical thinking... it is not. When you understand the economics of science and follow the money, you will realize that much of this glorious peer-reviewed research amounts to a hill of beans and is actually often evidence that you should not trust the people doing these often rather obviously lame studies.

"You see, if there are no regulations or rules regarding placebo, then none of the placebo-controlled clinical trials are scientifically valid.

It's amazing how medical scientists will get rough and tough when attacking homeopathy, touting how their own medicine is "based on the gold standard of scientific evidence!" and yet when it really comes down to it, their scientific evidence is just a jug of quackery mixed with a pinch of wishful thinking and a wisp of pseudoscientific gobbledygook, all framed in the language of scientism by members of the FDA who wouldn't recognize real science if they tripped and fell into a vat full of it.

Big Pharma and the FDA have based their entire system of scientific evidence on a placebo fraud! And if the placebo isn't a placebo, then the scientific evidence isn't scientific."

You can't use that as an excuse for not providing proof for your claims, no matter how true it may be for whatever drug/clinical trial/pharmaceutical company were talking about.

Yes your right, and theres alot of cherrypicking of the data in those trials, but its not the case all the time, or imho most of the time.

Theres only subjective degrees of proof/facts about the affects of a medical procedure/device/drug, but you can't dismiss all of the evidence based studies because theres some tainted data in the "agreed upon" standard of fda approval. You can dismiss the shoddy studies, or no studies at all, but thats not the case all the time.

Nobody is putting the fda/clinical approval on a pedestal as the gold standard, if you aren't critical about researching the studies, then its your own fault for entrusting the fda to make decisions for you. But the fact remains, that there is evidence based trials that are not tainted, and its the only standard to hold any medical claims to.

To summarize, yes the fda approval/testing process is flawed, but nobody is making the argument its foolproof, and i don't see how a few bad trials where there was tampering with the data on the part of the people who wanted the drug approved, is a justification for dismissing the process entirely. Its not the science thats flawed, its the approval process/institutions that allow this to happen (the fda).