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Animals and Placebo effect?

T'ai Chi

Penultimate Amazing
T
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May 20, 2003
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Are there placebo effects in studies on animals? If so, are there any references to studies which show this?
 
It seems to me the placebo effect can work one of two ways. Either you've got n imaginary illness that you don't really need curing from, which an animal could have, but we wouldn't know about it, since they couldn't very well tell us they imagined they were feeling bad.

Or, you can have a real illness, and have an imaginary recovery due to a placebo. Again, this would require communication to confirm - I don't think the study you'd like can be conducted in any meaningful way.
 
scribble said:
It seems to me the placebo effect can work one of two ways. Either you've got n imaginary illness that you don't really need curing from, which an animal could have, but we wouldn't know about it, since they couldn't very well tell us they imagined they were feeling bad.

Or, you can have a real illness, and have an imaginary recovery due to a placebo. Again, this would require communication to confirm - I don't think the study you'd like can be conducted in any meaningful way.
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Indeed. It's very hard to do. I've heard many vets report (Rolfe, are you listening?) that the owners of the pets often report that the pets are better even when they aren't.

I've found it very hard to tell when my dogs are even in pain. Siren used to shiver. Tess doesn't shiver, even when she got the puncture wound in her side. She sometimes becomes quiet, however. As far as I can tell, Bosco doesn't have any pain sensors at all, except for the fact that she occasionally yelps when I step on her foot.
 
epepke said:
As far as I can tell, Bosco doesn't have any pain sensors at all, except for the fact that she occasionally yelps when I step on her foot.
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My old scottish terrier - recently deceased - redefined stoic. He could fall down an entire flight of stairs - bouncing on his head the whole way - and get up at the end and give you a look like "That was fun! Let's do it again!" I never saw any amount of pain that made him react, but he was scared to death of the electric grinder we used to trim his nails, which couldn't have hurt at all. Weird.
 
Pyrrho,

Here is a good site to add to your list of links. Run by Bob Imrie and Dave Ramey:

http://www.vet-task-force.com

More specifically, here is a letter to the editor from that site:

"Some might argue that acupuncture works because trials on animals have proved it. The (somewhat muddled) notion is that animals are not prone to placebo responses. Let us look at the analogous sequence of' events when acupuncture was given to horses. Early pilot studies had suggested that it might help the pain of lameness.7 Nonrandomized trials apparently confirmed this notion.8 But one of the very few randomized clinical trials of acupuncture in animals showed that acupuncture?treated horses fared no better than untreated controls.9 "

"Fools and horses can afford to be shortsighted; physicians cannot."
 
I'm not sure I can add anything to what Bob Imrie and David Ramey have already said, but in fact it seems even easier to "imagine" an improvement when the patient is an animal. In effect, you have interposed another, probably biassed, observer into the system. You don't ask the animal how it feels, you ask the owner. And as the owner is interpreting the animal's behaviour and not feeling the discomfort directly, subjectivity can be fairly marked.

Quack (enthusiastically): Oh, he's ever so much better, isn't he!
Owner (doubtfully): Well, maybe....
Quack (getting carried away): Oh yes, look at that wet nose, those grateful eyes, and he's even wagging his tail!
Owner (convinced): Oh, isn't that wonderful!
Dog: I feel terrible, you freaking morons!

Of course, if you introduce objective measurements into the system this pretty much breaks down. I've seen interesting work on a woo-woo product for arthritis where the blinding broke down in one group, and that was the precise place where a significant positive effect was recorded for the snake-oil by the subjective questionnaire. However, objective force-plate measurements revealed no difference. Quacks, however, aren't very big on objective measurements.

Rolfe.
 
Shame on you. That is not a very nice way in which to talk about your vetinary colleagues now is it.

I am sure they would not appreciate being called Quacks?!!

I would be careful if I were you. You mind find that you need friends one day and you probably do not have any at the moment with your so obviously blinkered attitudes.!!
 
Homeoskeptic said:
Shame on you. That is not a very nice way in which to talk about your vetinary colleagues now is it.

I am sure they would not appreciate being called Quacks?!!

I would be careful if I were you. You mind find that you need friends one day and you probably do not have any at the moment with your so obviously blinkered attitudes.!!
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He's got at least one. And even if he has fewer, they're at least less likely to hang him out to dry on the advice of a psychic, or let him drown in his own mucus by treating pnuemonia with sugar.

Now that the obligatory insult posts are done, can you try to mention something that is remotely concerned with the topic?

On-topic:

I always wonder if owner expectation plays into this at all. Remember the horse that could add? It picked up changes in body language of it's owner (all unintentional) so it knew when to stop stamping its hoof. I wonder if an animal given some sort of medicine might not pick up on the owners improved mood, and thus display more activity itself. Just another aspect to think about.
 
Wolves can't show pain in front of the rest of the pack so they are very good at hiding pain. So what many owners see is this:

Dog has bad, but not deadly problem.
Dog winces and whines due to unbearable pain
Owner puts dog on woo woo drug
Dog gets used to pain/heals a little naturally, not due to homeocrap
Dog is eventually able to deal with pain so it looks fine even though it's not
Owner assumes sCAM helped because dog is not longer whining.

Stoicism is a way of life among canines, they hide their pain naturally without needing the placebo effect.
 
Huntsman said:
I always wonder if owner expectation plays into this at all. Remember the horse that could add? It picked up changes in body language of it's owner (all unintentional) so it knew when to stop stamping its hoof. I wonder if an animal given some sort of medicine might not pick up on the owners improved mood, and thus display more activity itself. Just another aspect to think about.
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This is frequently included as part of the "placebo" explanation in animals. I'm not sure how much of it really happens, and how much is just owner expectation. I'm in the owner expectation camp myself, because I know how often you have to choke off owners who are enthusiastically telling you how much better their pet is when in fact things really aren't as good as the powner thinks they are.

Rolfe.
 
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