Research On Placebo Treatment And Placebo Effects

The placebo effect has been affecting people for hundreds of years. In the 1940s sugar pills were sold in doctors’ catalogs specifically for the purpose of prescribing them to psychiatric patients. Today, over 60% of doctors admit to prescribing placebos to their patients, although there is an unwritten rule among doctors in the United States that placebos should no longer be given to patients. Some even do it on a regular basis because they believe the effect a fake drug has on the brain is more effective for its price than the real medication or treatment. In the documentary, Placebo: Cracking the Code, viewers see a few different perspective of the placebo effect. They hear from doctors, patients, and researchers to more fully understand the ins and outs of the placebo effect. These different viewpoints serve as an effective way to bring light the producers’ purpose: to show just helpful and sometimes harmful placebo drugs can be.

Proponents of placebo-prescribing argue that clinicians “can use non-deceptive means to promote a positive placebo response in their patients” (Brody, 1982, 112). However, some proponents also argue that

When you are deceived by someone, you are unable to govern yourself in the appropriate manner. Meaning that, your decisions and actions are altered because of the lack of truth involved. When someone lies, they are explicitly confirming something that is false. Placebos, which are inactive ingredients, are given to patient when physicians believe that the source of illness is not actually physical, but it is mental. Placebos violate both Mill and Kant ethical principles.

However, a significant improvement in radicular pain was not documented. Furthermore, according to NCBI, more placebo-controlled trials would be required for the complete confirmation of the efficacy of lamotrigine, an antiepileptic mood stabilizer in the treatment of depression.

The author continues to demonstrate how the placebo effect works by comparing it to the famous biological study by Ivan Pavlov. In Pavlov’s experiment, dogs are conditioned to respond to a specific stimulus and eventually begin to respond to the same stimulus in the same way all the time. Bjerklie explains that, “as far as the placebo effect is concerned, we may as well be those impressionable canines.” What Bjerklie means is that the human mind has the ability to be conditioned to expect certain outcomes. The placebo effect builds on the human minds ability to be conditioned and an individual’s faith in the healthcare providers it choses to visit. Overtime the human mind has come to believe that if given a medication that is suppose to have a positive effect on a specific pathology, it will in fact have an positive effect.

The article goes on to say that “some of the misleading reporting observed…was deliberate” (Gary, 2010). It is unethical to try and sway the consumer into using your product with false or misleading information. When someone is sick he or she wants the best care that his or her insurance can provide and he or she are not getting that with this misleading information. The author of the article seems to be concerned with this idea of unethical medical research. According to the author research has proven that misleading research is used often for financial gain. The author does not site one specific person or business, but points the finger at the healthcare and drug markets in general. The author does use one specific source for his research though. He found gaps in the marketing of Pleo-Sanum. He noticed that one of the statements in the article about the product stated that “The investigators reported in the Results section that active treatment produced a significant benefit, whereas placebo did not.” A normal person reading the article would not catch on to the fact that the product had been spun to make the product seem better. Consumers are not dumb, but have no choice but believe what is laid out in front of them. Consumers expect the people who are selling the products to be honest and ethical individuals but research has

In “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science,” David H. Freedman discusses this issue by stating that a meta-researcher named Ioannidis “has become one of the worlds foremost experts on credibility medical research.” Ioannidis believes that medication prescribed by doctors is “misleading, exaggerated, and flat out wrong. He charges that 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.” This goes to show that even the most educated and trained individuals can be misguided. It’s

One of the interesting things I have learned from Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science is how significant it is to know the difference between science and pseudoscience. As Goldacre discusses, most people see science as an authority not a method (Goldacre, page 3); so they mistakenly confuse market-based pseudoscientific products with science. Science is about experimental methods and testing specific hypothesis by controlling conditions to see the effects of studied factors. Pseudoscience, in contrast, ignores experimental methods, takes advantage of the science name, and justify its findings by shifting into untestable positions (Goldacre, page 7). The emergence of detox products (Goldacre, page 4), brain gym (Goldacre, page 15), homeopathy (Goldacre, page 30) and other types of alternative therapies are good examples. One key point here is the importance of experimental methods. One way to find out the basic of science, we need to disprove pseudoscientific claims (Goldacre, page 3) and it is done thorough experimental methods.

The trial I chose to explore for this discussion is the Risperidone Trials that occurred in India. For this trial, psychiatric patients were lied to by being told that their specific anti-psychotic drugs were no longer available, and then were given a drug called risperidone or just a placebo (SOMO Briefing Paper, 2008). This was unethical because the patients were lied to and informed consent was not obtained from the individuals who participated in this clinical trial. All of the participants receiving the placebo were unaware that they were not being provided legitimate anti-psychotic medications. Providing placebos instead of medications to these individuals was a dangerous decision, especially since these individuals depended on these drugs in order to maintain a semblance of sanity. An ethical principle that this violates is known as beneficence, which is the idea that if we can, we ought to do good (or what is right) in any given

Endogenous opioids are largely involved with the placebo effect, in which a patient expects an improvement in their clinical status, and can result in the reduction of pain without any real treatment. One of the main ideas behind this phenomenon is the concept of expectation, which is a top down regulation of pain.

The placebo group’s therapy is withheld in order to reduce bias and eliminate the chance of false improvements due to the placebo effect (up to 30% of placebo reactors).

While noting that the ethical issue of deception exists, the significant benefits of placebos are revealed through studying some clinical cases and by determining the actual changes taking place in the brain and the body. Trust, found in the doctor-patient relationship, impacts the extent of the placebo effect. To possibly help solve the ethical issue of deception surrounding around the placebo effect, Kaptchuk points out that more research needs to be executed in order to carry out the placebo effect “with conformed consent” of the patient for the doctor to do what they believe is necessary for the patient’s well-being (9). This would eliminate the ethical issue of deception while still allowing “medicine’s goal to heal” to remain intact

In controlled studies, experimenters use placebos as medium to compare the efficacy of a drug. Double-blind controlled studies provide information on whether a drug is effective or if it is not better than placebo. The results of double-blind studies usually depict the latter. Rarely are drugs found to be significantly more effective than placebo because of the placebo effect. The phenomenal effectiveness of the placebo in controlled experiments is mind boggling. Experimenters can not fully understand the etiology of the placebo effect in relation to the nervous system but they have proposed plausible suggestions to the underlying mechanisms involved. An intriguing question raised is the placebo's

However, numerous studies have reported a lack of difference between the control group and experimental groups within their experiments. For example, in an effort to alleviate pain from carpal tunnel syndrome, a double blind, random experiment was conducted with about thirty patients, which yielded no difference between the control group and the experimental group. However, both groups did report pain improvement (The Journal of family practice, 2002). This study can be used as an example of the power of the placebo effect in decreasing pain. However, as stated earlier conflicting studies to exist, such as the well know Baylor study in Houston. A double blind study of magnetic therapy which reported results that attested to the pain alleviating qualities of magnets. The Baylor study results are, however, contested by questions of researcher bias, the ever subjective nature of pain research, if the groups were truely selected randomly (Barrett,

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