As research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy has flourished over the past two decades, scholars have increasingly borrowed various research strategies, including the placebo concept, from medicine. The recent movement toward evidence-based treatment in mental health has also highlighted psychological placebos as control conditions against which to define empirically supported psychotherapi...

We review density functional theory (DFT) within the Kohn-Sham (KS) and the generalized KS (GKS) frameworks from a theoretical perspective for both time-independent and time-dependent problems. We focus on the use of range-separated hybrids within a GKS approach as a practical remedy for dealing with the deleterious long-range self-repulsion plaguing many approximate implementations of DFT. Thi...

The therapeutic response to a drug treatment is a mixture of direct pharmacological action and placebo effect. Therefore, harnessing the positive aspects of the placebo effect and reducing the negative ones could potentially benefit the patient. This article is aimed at providing an overview for clinicians of the importance of contextual psychosocial variables in determining treatment response,...

BACKGROUND There is evidence that offenders consume diets lacking in essential nutrients and this could adversely affect their behaviour. AIMS To test empirically if physiologically adequate intakes of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids cause a reduction in antisocial behaviour. METHOD Experimental, double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised trial of nutritional supplements on 2...

We conducted two parallel, blinded homeopathic pathogenetic trials conducted at two different sites to determine whether symptoms reported by healthy volunteers were significantly different for homeopathic remedies than for placebos. Study 1 used a two-armed design, testing ozone against placebo. Study 2 used a three-armed design, testing ozone and iridium against placebo. We found significantl...

starting treatment of chronic indolent conditions at doses lower than those typically recommended in the product monographs. The approach we recommend is to use a very low dose when starting a new medication if the condition is not life-threatening or producing severe symptoms. Unfortunately, this approach is not used that much in practice. First, we should define “very low dose.” The “start lo...

Although there is an extensive literature on the placebo effect in psychotherapy, the distinction between the placebo and other elements of the therapeutic process has not been clear. This paper analyzes the therapeutic relationship in terms of separating the placebo elements and the specific actors. The so-called nonspecific elements, often equated with the placebo, are proposed as the specifi...

The animus toward placebos arises from the notion that the symptoms they alleviate must belong mostly to psychosomatic illnesses. But lately the mindset that underlies placebo disparagement has been fading. The author talks with experts about placebo research, including implications for provider-patient encounters.

Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory (DFT) describes well the atomistic structure of molecular junctions and their coupling to the semi-infinite metallic electrodes but severely overestimates conductance due to the spuriously large density of charge-carrier states of the KS system. Previous works show that inclusion of appropriate amounts of nonlocal exchange in the functional can fix the p...