Placebo

Both my partner, Emily Rood and I are intrigued by the placebo effect in medicine, thus choosing to answer the following question as our topic: Is it permissible to prescribe placebos without the patient knowing? A placebo is a harmless medicine given to patients by their physician to mentally induce healing for the patient. The placebo is purely physiological because the patient believe that he/she is receiving a medicine to cure a discomfort, but the actual medicine doesn’t alleviate the…

got hurt, did your mom kiss your boo-boos? You probably felt better afterward, knowing that “Mommy” took the pain away. What you experienced is known as the placebo effect. A placebo, your mom’s kisses, is fake medicine or anything that has no therapeutic value. The effect itself is any reaction that is the consequence of administering the placebo. So when your mom kissed your sore bruises, she tricked you into thinking that your injuries were being healed. Resulting of your brain into tricking…

Introduction The Placebo effect, sometimes referred to as “sham effect,” is an advantageous effect produced by a fake treatment. It focuses on the minds ability to trick itself by using the individual's belief in that treatment. If the individual believes that a treatment will work, it can begin to seem as if it is actually working, and or actually work. It is seen more often than one would think and is normally associated with placebo pills and shots. These placebos do not contain any…

Hill et al. (2006) conducted a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled study to investigate the difference between β-Alanine supplementation after 4 and 10 weeks and the effect on intense cycling capacity. 25 fit undergraduate and postgraduate fit male participants from the University of Chichester, characterized by low economy and low meat consumption, liberally volunteered to participate. Subjects were not taking any dietary supplements and refrained from supplements 6 weeks before the…

patients often accept name brand prescriptions rather than generic prescriptions that do the exact same things. The labeling effect can distract from the placebo effect, but it can also be very beneficial as a complementary force of positive deception. Daniel Moermann gives a great example of a study in which women given headache curing placebos greatly preferred the brand labeled pill over the generic labeled pill despite the fact that neither actually cured their headaches (Daniel Moermann).…

Clinical Question Is citicoline effective in improving the recovery of acute ischemic stroke versus placebo? Evidence-Based Answer Six randomized, placebo-controlled trials have been conducted evaluating the efficacy of citicoline in improving the recovery in patients with acute ischemic stroke. The first study revealed citicoline to be more effective than placebo in patients with moderate to mild ischemic stroke. The following three trials by Clark et al focused on finding an effective dose…

Deception is at the core of the issue when using placebo drugs as a form of treatment (Benedetti, 2012). Deception has multiple definitions is this situation. However, Blease, Colloca and Kaptchuk (2016) describe deception as the act of withholding information with the intention to mislead the individual into thinking something else. Even when doctors can support the idea that the use of placebos is an effective course of treatment because the positive expectations that arises from it has the…

According to The Social Anxiety Association, social anxiety disorder (SAD) is defined as having a fear of social situations that involve interaction(s) with other people. People with social anxiety fear being negatively judged and evaluated by other people. They often have a misperception of themselves, including their appearance and self-worth (Richards 2013). Social anxiety is the third largest mental health care problem in the world, effecting about 7% of the population (Richards 2013).…

these concerns to rest by testing mindfulness-based treatments against placebo treatments. Zeidan et al. (2015) randomly assigned 75 participants to one of four groups: 1) mindfulness-meditation, 2) placebo conditioning, 3) sham mindfulness-meditation, or 4) book-listening control intervention. Psychophysical assessments of pain were used to examine the efficacy of each treatment, showing that while mindfulness-meditation, placebo, and sham mindfulness-meditation all significantly alleviated…

occurs after immunization.2 Acetaminophen has been used for decades in various settings for its antipyretic effects, however the efficacy and safety of using this agent when immunizing infants is investigated. 3 The clinical trial, “A Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial of Acetaminophen for Prevention of Post-Vaccination…