Cancer and Placebos

Placebos and Medical Education

THE PLACEBO CHALLENGE Placebos are ubiquitous, counterintuitive, topical, and germane to medical science (1). Current scientific understanding about placebos, however, is sparse, fraught with debates and even explicit confusion (2-4). Whether one subscribes to placebo phobia or placebo mania (5), the domain of placebos draws on definitions, concepts, and paradigms that often baffle not just the...

Placebos and treatment of pain.

A 52-year-old female patient, with a long history of chronic low back pain treated over time with various modalities including, recently, opioids, goes on Friday evening to the emergency room for, she says, “excruciating, paralyzing, back pain.” The house officer working her up finds that she just ran out of the pain medications she was previously on; his evaluation is totally negative; the pat...

‘Placebos’ and the Logic of Placebo Comparison

Robin Nunn has argued that we should stop using the terms ‘placebo’ and ‘placebo effect’. I argue in support of Nunn’s position by considering the logic of why we perform placebo comparisons. Like all comparisons, placebo comparison is just a case of comparing one thing with another, but it is a mistake, I argue, to think of placebo comparison as a case where something is compared to ‘a placebo...

Placebos in practice.

http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/329/7472/927 Updated information and services can be found at: These include: Data supplement http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/329/7472/927/DC1 "References w1 w5" References http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/329/7472/927#otherarticles 5 online articles that cite this article can be accessed at: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/329/7472/927#BIBL This article cites 7 a...

Lying to win-placebos and sport science.