From the footer of the press release kindly submitted here:

"Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length."

It helps the quality of discussion here on Hacker News, especially the quality of discussion of medical topics, to prefer sources other than press releases and press release recycling services like ScienceDaily for news on medical topics. Most new medical study findings are never replicated and are presumptively false.[1] Most study findings about placebo effects do not take into account the complications of defining what a placebo is, really, in a clinical trial context or what mechanisms might produce a placebo effect.[2] The small-n study reported here relies on subject patient measures of a subjective symptom, pain, and doesn't suggest any actual clinical effect on patients that can be objectively measured (such as reduction of tissue damage).

Press releases are a known part of the science hype cycle used to draw in more funding for research labs.[3] Let's go behind the hype and see what experienced science journalists and other scientists say about each lab's press release before opening discussion here.

Anyway, Hacker News participants have been saying for years that it's a good idea to look for better sources than Science Daily.[4] If Science Daily is the only place of publication for a finding, I find it more useful to look for another source before presuming the hyped finding represents a fact about the world.

[1] "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", John P. A. Ioannidis, August 30, 2005

http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou...

[2] "Are Placebos Getting Stronger?" Steven Novella, October 21, 2015

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-placebos-getting-st...

"Placebo by Conditioning", Steven Novella, July 29, 2015

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-by-conditioning...

"Placebo, Are You There?" Harriet Hall February 24, 2015

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/placebo-are-you-there/

[3] "The Science News Cycle"

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

"Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles"

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/related-by-coi...

"Anatomy of a Press Release"

http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/21/anatomy-of-a-press-rel...

[4] Comments about ScienceDaily:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dn...

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic-...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."