Placebo Research Paper

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.

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

Shared decision-making involves an open and honest conversation between the clinician and the patient. It is a collaboration that takes into account treatment options and the patient’s values and preferences. It gives a patient a voice in their own care. Therefore, pure placebo-prescribing is ethical when the patient has a say – which can foster a placebo effect within the patient. Not from the pill “itself, but rather from the relationship between [the] healer and [the] patient, and the latter’s own capacity for self-healing” (Brody, 1982, 117). In other words, the context in which the pure placebo is prescribed can influence its positive results. Contrastingly, when patients are left out of the decision-making process, there is no room for the clinician’s and patient’s relationship to grow. It also raises the possibility of deception – a concept appearing in almost all of the medical literature on placebo-prescribing in clinical practice.

If the patient’s prescriber feels the patient will benefit from a drug from the higher

Alternative hypothesis: The IQ of the subjects was higher while they were taking the drug than while they were taking the placebo. (The population average is greater than 0).

Patients are intrigued by the idea that a medication will actually fight for them and be a powerful ally, in comparison to their current treatment that does “just enough” to get them by. They can

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

A Placebo is something, like a tablet, that might be given to a patent by a drug testing group to see whether or not a new drug on the market actually works. Generally, half of the test group is given the “real” drug that might do anything from treat headaches to reduce acne. The other half of the group, without knowing, are given a fake pill that might only contain sugar but they believe they are getting the real thing. From the results of the two groups scientists can tell whether or not the drug has a real effect rather than people believing that it will. This is how science finds the drugs that work among the stuff that doesn't. This is great news from the public because that means we always great medicine that will work as described and not a fake box of sugar pills. The Nocebo effect is

Derived from Latin, the term placebo translates into “I shall please, future indicative of placere to please” (etymonline.com). Dating back to early 13th Century, the term first appeared in the opening antiphon of Psalms cxiv.9. However, its appearance in medical literature did not occur until 1785 (etymonline.com). Furthermore, it was not until the 1940s, “with the adoption of [the] double-blind” study that placebos were employed in clinical research (Brody, 1982, 112). In clinical research, placebos are used as an inactive therapy to aid in evaluating whether an experimental drug is effective. In clinical practice, placebos are used as a medical treatment. Now, controversy over placebo-prescribing often stems from the

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.

he placebo effect has many positives and negatives. Some of the positives are theoretically if the patient believes in the drug it can help alleviate physical or psychological symptoms or even disease, like in Dr. Wright's case. Another positive is being told something will help them can at least put a patient at easy even if it doesn't help cure them. Also it is generally not harmful in studies because it is just a sugar pill, and contains no actual drug, although if the person taking the placebo though it would hurt them then it could have a nocebo type of affect on them. The last positive is that if it can be found to cure people it is very affordable, due to it generally being made of sugar.

1. Table 8.1 shows results of an eight-center clinical trial to compare a drug to placebo for curing an infection. At each center, subjects were randomly assigned to two groups.

In total, the results of 1460 patients receiving antidepressant medication and 858 receiving a placebo sugar pill were analyzed. This analysis combined the results from these 19 different studies and generated an effect size (which is calculated as the mean of the experimental group minus the mean of the control group, divided by the pooled standard deviation SD). Once Kirsch and Sapirstein subtracted mean placebo response rates from mean drug response rates, they found a mean medication effect of 0.39 SDs (1). For each type of medication, the effect size for the active drug response to drug response is between 1.43 and 1.69, and the placebo response is between 74% and 76% of the active drug response. This means that 75% of the effect attributed to the perceived use of anti-depressants was due to the placebo. The perception of clinical benefit from antidepressants was largely attributed to the perceptions of the mind, and not to the actual chemical make-up of the pills patients were taking. The placebo effect shows us that the mind heavily influences our perceptions of wellness and health.

It is now accepted worldwide that before a drug is brought into routine use its efficacy, safety, and the balance between two need to be formally demonstrated. The efficacy of new drugs nowadays is almost invariably established with a technique known as ‘randomized controlled trial’.

A placebo-based study performed at Cardiff University (UK) included 755 participants, over 4-months, at 3–5 doses, daily.