Placebex: the next generation of antipsychotic

Placebex boldly goes where no antipsychotic has gone before: it will cease the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia.

I am suggesting this idea as an immoral healthcare experiment.

The public and doctors will hear of a new drug for schizophrenia. It is given as an adjunct to current treatments. Placbex will be marketed just like any other psychiatric drug is marketed. It will be marketed as a miracle cure.

Practioners will be expected to report back on performance in clinical practice as part of a new way to measure if treatment is effective. It's a paradigm taken from the Improved Access to Psychological Therapies scheme where patients were monitored at a much higher level than any other new treatment program.

The purpose of this insane idea? To test one thing: the power of the placebo effect.

Of course it would be far too immoral to lie to patients that there was a treatment that would stop the delusions and hallucinations in schizophrenia....oh shit....that's already happened.

Something else has already happened too. In the last decade counterfeit Zyprexa/olanzapine ended the supply chain. Patients were given a drug which only had 60% of the active ingredient. This was prescribed to them without doctors or pharmcists realising their medication levels were lowered by a criminal gang.

If it is possible to profile where the counterfeit drug was prescribed and where it wasn't and for how long with a high degree of accuracy then there is an opportunity to see just how potent the power of the placebo effect is.

It is so powerful that sham ECT is shown to be as effect as ECT on long term follow up in a review of high quality trials. ECT causes more harm than antipsychotic treatment but antipsychotic treatment is still used on people.