Increasingly a focus of research as well as media reports and online forums, the use of placebos in clinical medicine extends beyond sugar pills and saline injections. Physician surveys conducted in various countries invariably report that placebos are routinely used clinically, impure placebos more frequently than the pure ones, and that physicians consider them to be of legitimate therapeutic...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE A recent Cochrane review on placebo interventions for all kinds of conditions found that 'physical placebos' (which included sham acupuncture) were associated with larger effects over no-treatment control groups than 'pharmacological placebos'. We re-analyzed the data from this review to investigate whether effects associated with sham acupuncture differed from those of...

BACKGROUND Placebos play an important role in clinical trials and several surveys have shown that they are also common in daily practice. Previous research focused primarily on the frequency of placebo use in outpatient care. Our aim was to explore physicians' views on the use of placebos in daily practice, whereby distinction was made between pure placebos (substances with no pharmacological e...

Controversial and ethically tenuous, the use of placebos is central to medicine but even more pivotal to psychosocial therapies. Scholars, researchers, and practitioners largely disagree about the conceptualization of placebos. While different professionals often confound the meanings of placebo effects with placebo responses, physicians continue to prescribe placebos as part of clinical practi...

BACKGROUND Placebos are widely used in clinical practice in spite of ethical restrictions. Whether such use is justified depends in part on the relative benefit of placebos compared to 'active' treatments. A direct test for differences between placebo and 'active' treatment effects has not been conducted. OBJECTIVES We aimed to test for differences between treatment and placebo effects within...

BACKGROUND Physicians around the world report to using placebos in a variety of situations and with varying degrees of frequency. Inconsistent methodologies, however, complicate interpretation and prevent direct comparisons across studies. While US- and Canada-based physicians share similar professional standards, Canada harbours a less-litigious universal healthcare model with no formal placeb...

BACKGROUND Several studies demonstrated that placebo treatment may have a significant impact on many different symptoms. While in the traditional view concealment of the placebo is essential, recent studies report intriguing evidence that placebos may work even without deception. For example, it has been demonstrated that open-label placebos can improve symptoms in allergic rhinitis. However, t...

Among medical researchers and clinicians the dominant view is that it is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing a placebo. This opinion is formalized in a recent policy issued by the American Medical Association (AMA [Chicago, IL]). Although placebos can be shown to be always safe, often effective, and sometimes necessary, doctors are now effectively prohibited from using them in clinical...