Regular forum readers know how hard I am on "woo woo" medicine posts. But I've been hard on unnecessary neck dissections, mandatory PEGs, failure to do TSH test before TX and other "western medicine" issues. Today's Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on sleeping pills and the placebo effect.
Since I'm a subscriber, my links go thru a pay wall and don't work here so I'll excerpt it
[quote]About 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills were filled in the US last year....Yet a number of studies have shown that drugs like Ambien and Lunesta offer no significant improvements in the quality of users sleep....patients taking popular prescription sleeping pills fell asleep just 13 minutes faster than those given a sugar pill. They slept for a grand total of 11 minutes longer. People seem to overestimate the effectiveness of sleeping pills partly because of the placebo effect and partly because some of these pills cause short-term memory loss that leaves people believing they got better sleep than they actually did- they just don't remember all their tossing and turning. [/quote]
NIH has a series of studies saying the same.
Charm