FWIS3

Free, in this case, to make more informed decisions about over-the-counter drugs.

https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/05/10/empathy-reliever/

TL;DR

Acetaminophen blocks empathy as well as pain.

Yeah, don't care.

I feel it's personal choice

vendic wrote:Yeah, don't care.

Of course, if I'm in a lot of pain, I don't feel much empathy for anyone other than myself either. (and no, that wasn't a joke, that was serious)

The studies compared people who had taken acetaminophen versus those who didn't, and none of them were in pain. So they didn't compare taking acetaminophen versus not taking it and being in pain. They also didn't compare it to other pain killers, so they don't know if this is particularly an effect of acetaminophen, or an effect generally of pain killers.

I'm underwhelmed by these studies.

they also didn't report any details of the analysis; simply that there was a difference. let's see some numbers, fellows. differences are not always statistically significant. sample size calculations? let's also hear what you did to make the 2 drinks taste the same. we're told that the subjects didn't know what group they were in (single blind). did the researchers know?

code monkey wrote:they also didn't report any details of the analysis; simply that there was a difference. let's see some numbers, fellows. differences are not always statistically significant. sample size calculations? let's also hear what you did to make the 2 drinks taste the same. we're told that the subjects didn't know what group they were in (single blind). did the researchers know?

Oh sure. Use that researcher logic stuff.

SciFiFisher wrote:

code monkey wrote:they also didn't report any details of the analysis; simply that there was a difference. let's see some numbers, fellows. differences are not always statistically significant. sample size calculations? let's also hear what you did to make the 2 drinks taste the same. we're told that the subjects didn't know what group they were in (single blind). did the researchers know?

Oh sure. Use that researcher logic stuff.

I suspect that cm and I suffer from a similar problem - we've been doing the "researcher logic stuff" our entire lives and we can't help ourselves.

Swift wrote:[I suspect that cm and I suffer from a similar problem - we've been doing the "researcher logic stuff" our entire lives and we can't help ourselves.

nor do we want to.

Heh. Thank you @Swift and @code monkey, that was enlightening.

(And this is why I'm grunting around in IT instead of the sciences )

SciFiFisher wrote:

code monkey wrote:they also didn't report any details of the analysis; simply that there was a difference. let's see some numbers, fellows. differences are not always statistically significant. sample size calculations? let's also hear what you did to make the 2 drinks taste the same. we're told that the subjects didn't know what group they were in (single blind). did the researchers know?

Oh sure. Use that researcher logic stuff.

Yeah, talk about unfair