The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among classical conditioning, expectancy, and fear in placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia. A total of 42 healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to three groups: placebo, nocebo, and control. They received 96 electrical stimuli, preceded by either orange or blue lights. A hidden conditioning procedure, in which participants were not...

OBJECTIVES Medication side effects are common, often leading to reduced quality of life, nonadherence, and financial costs for health services. Many side effects are the result of a psychologically mediated "nocebo effect." This review identifies the risk factors involved in the development of nocebo effects. METHOD Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Journals@Ovid full text, and Globa...

introduction: based on individual independence rights, patients can refrain from being treated or can voluntarily discontinue their treatment after receiving full information. this study aimed to review the reasons of treatment refusal and the status of informed refusals for patients. methods: this was a cross-sectional descriptive study. the study population included 135 patients who refused t...

the overwhelming rate of progress in biotechnological research especially in human genetics, as well as the high levels of power these researches provide us to intervene in human lives, brings serious concerns on the ethical problems that may rise from these research endeavors. to address this critical issue in iran, we conducted a study issuing publishing authors of studies in human genetics f...

background informed consent is an important part of the patients’ rights and hospitals are assigned to obtain informed consent before any diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. obtaining an informed consent enables patients to accept or reject their care or treatments and prevent future contentions among patients and medical staff.   methods this survey was carried out during 2011-2. we assessed...

Expectation of treatment side effects is consistently linked with those symptoms being realised. Patient expectations, including those generated by the informed consent process, can have a large influence on the side effects that patients feel after starting a new medical treatment. Such symptoms may be the result of the nocebo effect, whereby the expectation of side effects leads to them being...

A wealth of research shows that the expectancy to improve, either by verbal suggestion or by learning experiences, results in less pain and suffering [8]. There are also intriguing studies showing the relevance and usefulness of placebo in clinical settings [4]. Far less research is available on the reverse, the nocebo effect. Overall, results of these studies are concordant with the placebo re...

background esophageal cancer is highly prevalent among the turkman people in northeastern iran. in order to evaluate its etiology, there is an on-going prospective cohort study in this area involving approximately 50000 subjects over the age of 40 years. the majority of these subjects are illiterate, thus obtaining inâ­formed consent is very important and difficult. methods initially, we explai...