The medicine cabinet for chronic pain is—let’s face it—poor. At the bottom of the ladder is paracetamol: ineffective for low back pain and, in the long term, for osteoarthritis.Observational data have linked the increased use of paracetamol to cardiovascular, renal, and gastrointestinal side effects and overall mortality. Even topical anti-inflammatories do not avoid the well known side effects...

D efining a drug is an easy task: It is a molecule delivered to the body to produce a biological effect. Its mode of action is to alter one or more biochemical pathways, for instance, by binding to a receptor or by modifying the activity of an enzyme. Defining a placebo is a bit more complicated. A placebo is usually defined in pharmacological terms as an inert substance with no pharmacological...

seventeenth-century introduction of Jesuit's bark as "mere" placebos, Shapiro does attempt to provide some historical context for modem concerns. He considers therapy from ancient times to the present and he recounts the history of blind trials in detail. Interestingly, he is not entirely dismissive of religious cures, precisely because he is aware of the potential strength of the placebo effec...

One of the most important open challenges in modern Kohn-Sham (KS) density-functional theory (DFT) is the correct treatment of systems involving fractional electron charges and spins. Approximate exchange-correlation functionals struggle with such systems, leading to pervasive delocalization and static correlation errors. We demonstrate how these errors, which plague density-functional calculat...

Among studies with continuous outcomes in our systematic review comparing placebo effect sizes with treatment effect sizes we calculated mean differences between to estimate placebo effects, treatment effects, and the difference between placebo and treatment effects. In fact the standardized mean difference should have been used. There was no error in the calculations among studies with binary ...