Alan Levinovitz

What you're saying is this pharmacological intervention helped me.

So in some of these studies of metformin or rituximab, I pronounced it wrong, it doesn't matter.

Some of the studies of pharmacological interventions for long COVID, 30 to 60% of the placebo arm also recovered.

So the study is negative because the active arm is no better than the placebo arm.

But in one of them, there was even sustained recovery for a year in the placebo arm.

If you're testing a pharmaceutical, that's a failure.

If you're testing a mind-body trial or a mind-body intervention, it is a failure for the specific intervention.

But it also tells you that people are recovering either spontaneously or because they're in the trial or because the treatment as usual arm of the trial was affected.

And so in many ways, that's actually...

that's a positive result.

If you're not looking to confirm a pharmaceutical, if all you're looking to do is see, hey, how can we get people's symptoms to remit or how can we get people to recover partially or fully from this condition?

A study in which the placebo arm is remarkably successful

tells you something.

It doesn't tell you that the pharmaceutical worked, but it tells you that something works, right?

And so that's something I would point out as well that's a little bit different from, and which gets confused when people are like, we don't have any evidence of these interventions working.

So, well...

And then they get mad about the placebo effect and they talk about, which I understand too, people can exaggerate that.

Often placebo is confused with regression to the mean.

You come in when you're really sick, so you're likely to heal just over the course of time.

But again, if you can attribute all of these recoveries to natural remission,