Readit NewsBut placebos actually outperform no intervention.
But then, why prescribe the most expensive placebos where you co-finance societal harmful behavior, rather than just prescribing the "harmless" placebos that are not homeopathy, which are usually even cheaper and don't have any ideological overhead?
If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
And from an ethical point of view, the idea of financing a whole (homeopathic) industry that uses your money to produce fake science, even with a single cent, should make one shudder, shouldn't it?
This is why clinical studies don't tell neither group (neither the treated group nor the control group) who is in which group, to not spoil the results.
And also, this is why homeopathy puts so much effort into spreading the belief they are effective despite all odds, up to the point of trying to convince people to abandon basic scientific principles.
Also, contrast this with psychotherapy, which usually does work even better if the patient understands how it works, because it enables them to become an active and more effective part of the therapy.
It works even when you know it's a placebo.
This is why clinical studies don't tell neither group (neither the treated group nor the control group) who is in which group, to not spoil the results.
And also, this is why homeopathy puts so much effort into spreading the belief they are effective despite all odds, up to the point of trying to convince people to abandon basic scientific principles.
A friend of mine is an orthopedic surgeon, and they explained to me that for mild problems, which would normally heal on their own, it's cheaper to cover a placebo rather than real medication.
If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
And from an ethical point of view, the idea of financing a whole (homeopathic) industry that uses your money to produce fake science, even with a single cent, should make one shudder, shouldn't it?
I'm not saying that this is the best way to do this, but to me this was always the obvious thing to do. As a somewhat extreme example, I'd never write a graphical user interface in pure Win32 API and expect it to be even remotely portable by some additional layer. I'd rather use Qt (or GTK, or Dear ImGui, or whatever) for native UIs even for programs that are (for now) meant to be only run on Windows.
To me personally, this has the additional benefit that I can do most of the development and testing in a non-hostile environment (e.g. Debian), then running a cross compiler (e.g. via MXE) and only do the final testing on Windows (well, usually first Wine, then some Windows VM), but at that last stage surprises are extremely seldom.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/14/index.html
You'll quickly find which parts of the manual are interesting to you and which ones just repeat what you already know (or could have guessed on your own). Since the manual is very well structured, skipping those parts is very easy.
I wonder if in the near future we'll see a similar article regarding security - "You Can't Buy Security".
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9562
(which wasn't yet finished at the time of the article)