Last night I attended the Biennial Kass lecture entitled “On
the Efficacy of Placebos’. It was given by Charles Rosenberg. Professor of the
History of Science (Emeritus) at Harvard.
I am getting involved with the History of Science, Technology and
Medicine so as to become familiar with different ways of knowing and thinking,
as a way to distance myself from disciplinary thinking in Education and
Neuroscience and thereby gain another perspective for critiquing popular or
accepted wisdoms. Rosenberg began by providing a definition of placebo ‘ a
label for a shallow momentary effect’ and described how it was discussed in History; as a distractor in the eighteenth century, the patient wanting
something in the nineteenth century while our modern day Wikipedia describes it
as a form of deceit.
For medicine it is generally assumed that a placebo lacks
efficacy and that is why it is given in many randomised clinical trials of
treatment effects. Rosenberg raised a challenging question about this
assumption. Is it the case that a
placebo is inert/ineffective? Or is the act of receiving a placebo from the
doctor the active ingredient?
A similar question could be raised in Education. Lets assume
that any intervention based on a neuromyth has the status of a placebo. What
if a neuromyth for example, teaching according to a student’s learning style
preference, has transactional efficacy? Although irrelevant neuroscientifically
it has relevance for the student and therefore works for them, it provides a
structure of choice for the student Also, the active ingredient could be in the
interaction dynamics between the student and the teacher. There is also the
question of whether the intervention has its placebo effect on the teacher who
provides it. It is an idea that may
explain why teaching to learning style has become embedded in educational
culture as a ‘good’ thing.
