How would you react if you discovered your doctor had prescribed a placebo without telling you? Yet, ‘magically’, you felt better? I just read an article in TIME relating approximately 45% of interns at Chicago-area hosptials regularly prescribe placebos for their patients. Statistics seem to be vague on how many of these patients admit to feeling better…or even cured…but it does happen and not only in current times but in the past. Some say it’s cheating the patient…lying…but is it? Okay…so even if you think it might be…if you were not aware that you’d been given a placebo, had trust in your doctor and his prescription, had no adverse side-effects and you did, indeed, feel better, pain reduced or now absent, which would you ultimately rather have? Something with possible toxicity, one or more of the many side-effects warned on your prescription package?
Personally, I do think it probable that we can heal ourselves, our bodies have the mechanisms in place to naturally help that along but the trick is believing so. I can see where not knowing one was given a placebo would be much more beneficial to it being effective as opposed to being given advance knowledge that what you were popping was a sugar pill. As much as I may think it works I’d have a problem buying into it if suffering pain and needing relief! For instance, many dentists offer alternative methods to reduce or dispel the pain of treatment…such as music therapy. I love music, it does many wonderful things for me but ease the pain of extraction? Uh-uh…too much of a coward to take the chance! When he goes in with the pliers or drill I just don’t want to know or feel…further, I want to know I won’t know. Maybe it’s understanding that there will be no anaesthetic as we know it and have been accustomed to…it makes us a bit squirrely to sit in that chair and think “But what if the music doesn’t work…” and then the mind runs with imaginings of excruciating pain, no help in sight and now too late to ask for it.
Would faux medicine be any different if we were advised in advance? They say not necessarily…I’m not sure. Still, believing and trusting predominantly in complimentary treatments…magnets, acupuncture, specific modalities of massage, homeopathy I wonder why I’d balk at other benign treatments. I’m not so sure, though, why the professionals or perhaps legal eagles think it unfair patients given placebos are not told in advance or that it’s cheating the patient (unless those prescriptions are neglible in cost!). If they don’t know, feel or get better, isn’t that what they visited a doctor for in the first place? “First do no harm”, part of the Hippocratic Oath and surely this is one way to accomplish it.
Read the article here: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1700079,00.html
I’d be interested to know what you think.
I read with interest your article on Placebo treatment.
There will always be agruements for and against this method.
We now live in a world when time is of value to everyone, especially those people who work and are unabale to get time off to visit the Doctor in working hours.
Given a placebo and it does not work, means one has to make another trip to he his/her Doctor. When offered the ral drug, that patient may well not accept it, saying it did not work for them.
I think it is dangerous practice by Doctors to do this. It can also delay a healing process, or it can prolong unsufferable pain.
It may be of some value to Doctors who have patients visit them on a weekly basis with different aliments. THis would have to be assessed by the Doctor with great thought going into it before making a decision.
I do not visit the Doctor on a regular basis: I would be very angry if I was prescibed a placebo, only to find I had to try to see my Doctor out of working hours for a second time.
What do we know about the contents of a placebo? SUGAR maybe!
What about Diabetic?
No, give me the proper medication and allow me to get well and get on with my life.
After all, life is too short to be messing about with medication.
I really appreciate your comment, AnnieD…and see where you’re coming from…but supposing, knowing someone is Diabetic and having to treat for pain etc. they were given, say…something similar which would not adversely affect that and they did notice a difference…is anger still justifiable when you can get rid of what’s ailing you, get on with your life with less chemicals or invasive treatments and toxins in your system? Look at this:
http://ode1.deasil.com/doc/33/the_healing_power_of_placebos
Myself, I think the above article is really good, very promising.
You make valid points in your “argument” on the con side although I think I’d like to try the placebo…but not knowing I was…just to see how well it worked. Yet, I suppose if it didn’t I’d be off finding another doc in the belief that ‘this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing!”
While reading your post, what screamed out at me was the word “Interns”. They do not have enough experience to weigh if a patient only warrants a placebo. Seems dangerous to me. Even a “Board Certified” physician should know better than to trust his knowledge of medicine to a patient’s knowledge of self. Hey, why don’t the Interns prescribe placebos to the physicians and vice versa and leave us “Medicine for Dummies” alone. Well, have to go and take my prescribed medicine??????
True, YKNOT, but they prescribe medications, many of which carry a toxicity or severe and debillitating side-effects so if they can do that, why not a harmless placebo. At worst, nothing happens and the patient will return. At best, mind over matter and all is well. I do like your ideas of prescribing and treating physicians only I’d like to see physicians and surgeons treating the interns thus, perhaps, giving them personal experience in being on the receiving end of invasive treatments, tests, meds.