Sydney Spiesel writes about the myriad claimed treatments for autism in Slate. He's skeptical
If there is any illness for which 100 treatments are available, you can be sure that none of them works.
True. But he doesn't do a great job of addressing
why parents swear by such ineffective treatments. His answer is the "Hawthorne Effect". I think there's rather more to it than that. For one thing, Spiesel does not consider the possibility th
at a treatment might have no effect at all - not even a non-specific "placebo effect" - and still become popular.
But that happens. A PLoS ONE paper,
From Traditional Medicine to Witchcraft,
triesto explain why.
Although it features some maths and lots of graphs, the argument is summed up in a sentence
In other words, the less well a treatment works, the longer it gets used, and therefore, the more likely it is ...
