Placebo Treatment Research

Placebos have been used in clinical trials since the eighteenth century but did not become a research topic until the late twentieth century (van Haselen, 2013). Most often when using placebos in clinical trials it is to determine whether or not the active agent has more effect on a patient than the placebo by providing each to the same number of recipients. The trials are almost always double blinded, this means that both person giving the drug and the person receiving it are unaware whether or not it is active so that good care and relationships must be present in the recipients at all times (Tavel, 2014). Ovosi, Ibrahim, & Bello-Ovosi (2017) declared “The choice between placebo and active controls in clinical trials affects the quality of the result as well as the ethical and scientific acceptability by both the public and regulatory bodies. It has, therefore, continued to generate discuss among researchers” (para. 3). This goes against the autonomy of a patient which is the right for a person to

The patient’s attitude plays a major role in whether the placebo will work or not. If the patient is optimistic and expects the treatment to work, then the chances of it working will increase.

A placebo effect can affect how some people feel. The statistics show that placebo effect work on 1 of 3 people. A placebo can change the symptom that a person is having, that is called the placebo effect. Normally the term placebo effect is meant only for the beneficial effects a placebo has on reducing symptoms.(Szabo, A. 2013) The placebo effect usually lasts only a short time. If the placebo effect works scientist, doctors, and researchers have found that it must have something to do with

Imagine going to the doctor and being given medication to heal your pain. Now how would you feel if after taking the medication and feeling better you came to find out you were given a placebo? This may sound upsetting to some, however, “ a recent survey of U.S. internists and rheumatologists found that some 50% regular prescribe placebos.” A placebo is defined as a false treatment without any significant chemical properties or active ingredient. The use of placebos as a primary form of treatment with any pathology is not happening anytime soon, but their positive impact and usefulness in the medical field is becoming hard to deny. In the article, “The Magic of the Placebo”, author David Bjerklie attempts to explain the growing change in

The placebo effect is a widely known phenomenon where patients are given some form of dummy medication in place of actual medication that produces the same effect as the real medication would have. They intend to help stimulate areas of the brain that may prompt the release of chemicals such as endorphins to aid in the relief of the symptom. Tests have shown that forms such as injections psychologically perform better than pills, because of the slight pain that injections bring ( Freeman, Shanna. "How the Placebo Effect Works." HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks.com, 13 Jan. 2009. Web.). Because of the pain, people tend to believe that the medication would work better. Placebos can be used to treat multiple different diseases, but has been

Unlike conventional medication, the only part of the body affected during the placebo effect is the brain. (The mind and the body are connected and therefore ill people taking placebos often feel physically better). Typically, the person who is receiving the placebo from the doctor thinks he/she is getting real medicine. The client will go through the usual process of getting the treatment; seeing the reliable doctor, taking in medicine at specific times and amounts. All the normal rituals of treatments are preserved. The patient’s expectation of getting better while taking the placebo will be as high as when a real medicine is taken(H.K. Beecher 35% of 1082 patients) (A Comprehensive Review of the Placebo Effect: Recent Advances and Current Thought - Annual Review of Psychology). Numerous pieces of research have shown that people taking a placebo felt as good as people taking the actual medicine. Research is ongoing on how the placebo exactly works. “Indeed, there exists not a single but many placebo effects, with different mechanisms and in different

The purpose of medicine is as contested of a notion as the term patient. While there are certain ends in which it is clear that medicine seeks to achieve, controversy often arises over how medicine chooses to achieve these certain goals. One such controversy is the treatment of patient-symptoms, more specifically, the role of medication in treating patients. The purpose of this essay is not to discuss the general issues of prescribing medication. Rather, the purpose is

Even through all the enhancements in technology the brain still hides some secrets, the influence of the brain over the body in some aspects is inexplicable. In other word, it has not been determined a specific magnitude of how the brain will affect the rest of the body, especially related to healing. For example, the morphine could be able to reach a hundred percent of effectiveness if doctors talk before with their patients about the administration of morphine to reduce the feeling of pain, against a fifty percent effectiveness of morphine when they just administrate without telling. The name of this effect is called the placebo effect, which means in Latin “I shall please”, related to any substance without a medical treatment, to convince a patient that him or her will heal. It could

The placebo is a pill that contains no active ingredients, however appears to be the same as an actual drug. The placebo effect is when a person feels that the treatment they received has helped when in reality it was just a placebo. In modern medicine, patients feel as if they need a form of medication to cure their illness. According to the Huffington Post, research on the placebo effect that has been studied mainly on depression and migraines have seen a substantial benefit.[1]

We’ve all heard the joke before. Visualize being a doctor and lying about treatment for a patient. Kind of scary right? However, let us not forget that this patient has miraculously healed from said treatment. Does that make a difference in the fact stated before? That is exactly what is deliberated in a doctor’s mind when prescribing a placebo to their patient. For a moment imagine being the patient. How would one feel? Possibly ill? In desperate need of something to rid them well again, right? Essentially, being a patient, one will fundamentally place all of their trust into whatever the doctor prescribes without means of concern. Consequently, the patient discovers their treatment has been confirmed to have no effect, but they became better. After taking what the doctor prescribed, the patient more or less expected to ensure healthy. So they did. This remarkable medical therapy evidently validates to people that the “placebo effect” functions as expected; even if patients are unaware they are receiving a so-called ersatz treatment.

As per the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a cure is defined as, “something (such as a drug or medical treatment) that stops a disease and makes someone healthy again; something that ends a problem or improves a bad situation” (Merriam-Webster's, 2014). The study of science and philosophy are trying to work together so that we may answer the difficult questions that we have surrounding the world in which we live in. Scientific experiments are often conducted so that results may be obtained. These results often verify or disprove a scientific hypothesis; philosophers on the other hand are more concerned about what the view of the world should be. A placebo is a pill, treatment, procedure or medicine used in place of a real treatment, the patient ends up having a psychological effect than a physiological one. In science and according to a philosophical view where does a placebo fit in? And whether it can really exist as a cure. For the purpose of this paper I will discuss placebos’ as a cure and discuss the realist and antirealist views about the observable and unobservable phenomena.

The one that interests me the most is a phenomenon called the placebo effect. This phenomenon has been defined as “a beneficial effect produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore

Placebo refers to any medical treatment that is inert. The placebo has long been used in investigation trials to accurately test the effectiveness of a new health care treatment, such as a medicine or drug. A placebo is essential to the behaviour of many systematically-based proven trials. Sugar pill is one of the example of the placebo. In order to test the placebo effect, some scientist will use two groups, the first group will take the drugs and the second group will take the placebo. None of the members of the two groups know whether they are taking active or inactive substance. Sometimes, not even the researches know or this is what they called the double blind test. The effects of the drug and placebo from both groups will be compared

Using results from a meta-analysis, researchers have found that only 25% of patients from 2318 drug studies have actually responded to a real anti-depressant. 23.87% of the patients’ responses were due to depression history. Just over 50% of participants improved via the placebo effect. In an investigation by Benson & Freedman (1996) and Nesbitt Shanor (1999), evidence suggests that 60-90% of prescribed medications rely heavily on the placebo effect. Walter A. Brown, M.D. describes his post-flu cough that just would not go away. “Not only was speaking difficult, but the cough woke me up throughout the night, ruining my sleep.” He took a dose of cough syrup and it wasn’t proving effective. Walter called a doctor and was prescribed a cough suppressant, and was reassured that he’d feel a lot better. Being hopeful for his recovery due to the convincing by his doctor, Brown was cough-free within the

The placebo effect is often thought of as an act of fooling the mind into perceiving a benefit that has no physical basis. This depiction of the mind as a naïve and foolish organ may be incomplete and ill-representative of the mind's abilities. Indeed, the mind may orchestrate a physical response in the body based on its