It is Thursday the 28th of December 2017 and you're listening to Skeptics with the K, the podcast for science, reason, and critical thinking.

Skeptics with a K is a production of the Merseys Skeptic Society,

a non-profit organisation for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseys

around the UK and internationally. I am your host Mike Hall with me

today is nobody. Of course it's Christmas time which means the hosts of

Skeptics with the Kaye are scattered to the four winds enjoying a little bit of time off over the festive period

but rather than leave you wanting or indeed recording another drunk show we took the time to

record a little bit of bonus content especially for you now.

So I hope you enjoy it and we'll see you in 2018.

So I spent most of the last year talking about placebo effects and how they're not all

they're cracked up to me. Turns out this is a pretty big topic even though we've

discussed it from several different angles over the last year, there's still many aspects that I've not been able to talk about in any depth.

In particular, there's a paper on placebo effects in inflammatory skin conditions, which I'm still trying to get to grips with and a fascinating

effect caused by doctors exaggerating the condition of their patients in order to get

them into a study. So the first thing which seems to happen is those patients

improve even when they're on

placebo because it turns out their doctor is exaggerated their condition in the

first place in order to meet the inclusion criteria.

Yeah, yeah I suppose when you look at like clinical trials for something where someone's got something serious

and I was like well we've not got a good treatment for you but there is this trial that looks like it might be

promising so all we need to do is make you look like you're a bit sicker than you actually are in order to get you into the

trial don't they do that on house I'm sure they've done that on house they might have

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