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The Placebo Effect
The activity I chose to write about was on Dr. Walter A. Brown’s article in Scientific American about placebos and their effect on the patients. His article described what a placebo is and if it is ethical for doctors to prescribe this “treatment'; to their patients.
Dr. Brown, who is a psychologist at Brown University, decided to do a study on the effects of a placebo. A placebo is any treatment or drug with no medicinal value that is given to a patient to relieve symptoms of an ailment. His hypothesis in the article focused on if the placebos had any effect on the patients who took them.
To test his hypothesis, Dr. Brown and his colleagues performed experiments on patients who had depression. To test his idea, he employed what is known as the “double blind technique.'; This type of experimentation involves that neither the doctors nor the patients know if they are receiving the real “stuff'; or simply sugar pills (placebos). Only the experimenters know who gets what. What this supposedly does is that the patient will mentally think that the doctor is giving him/her the real drug and they will soon be feeling better. When in reality, it is themselves, not the medicine, which makes them feel better. These are the findings of Dr. Brown.
In his experiments on the placebos, he found that the placebo can make a person feel better, but it can also have no effect what-so-ever. In his study of the depressed patients, about 50% of the subjects with normal levels of cortisone benefited from the placebo, whereas, only about 35% of the depressed patients benefited from the drug. This led Dr. Brown to realize that there are other factors in treating depression. He found that the persons with short-term depression responded more favorably to the placebo than those with long-term depression.
Other doctors also performed “placebo experiments'; to realize if it really works. One example would be of the experiments led by Edmunds G. Diamond of the University of Kansas Medical Center in the 1950’s. His research involved the surgery to treat angina pectoris. He had a set of 18 patients suffering from this ailment have common surgery to relieve this symptom. In 13 of the patients, the doctors actually performed the operation, however in the other five, all they did was make an incision in the chest and sew it back up.
I begin in section 2 by discussing Grünbaum's detailed analysis of what a placebo is. I then use his idea of a generic intentional Placebo and discuss one of many similar experiments concerning the phenomenon of clinical depression, experiments that use the monoamine hypothesis and the notion of a generic intentional placebo. This experiment is described in section 3. In section 4 I analyze the results of this study and in section 5 I offer concluding remarks.
In his book, Meyers recounts the stories of numerous scientists and researchers who discovered something magnificent when merely looking for something else. This is not to say that all of the scientists did something wrong in their research, but Meyers argues that the beauty of serendipity in medical discoveries is that no matter where the discoveries come from or how they come about, all it takes is someone intelligent and creative enough to understand the true application of the discovery. Meyers writes about four different categories of discoveries in his book. The first category is full of historical medical discoveries mostly focusing on diseases and antibiotics. The second and most relevant category is about the numerous advancements in cancer treatment. The third category focuses on one major organ: the heart which requires major focus in modern American healthcare. The fourth and last category discusses different psychotropic drugs that have been discovered as well as their uses in medicine. One of the most interesting discoveries that Meyers discusses is written within the second
Ernst, E., & Resch, K. L. (1995). Concept of true and perceived placebo effects. British Medical
Article two entitled “Clinical trials: are they ethical?” is written by Eugene Passamani discusses the importance of randomized clinical trials. Passamani rejects the argument that the physician-patient relationship demands that physicians recommend ...
Clinical depression, which affects about 10% of the adult population (Holtz, Stokes, 1138), is charact...
What if you found out the medicine your doctor has been giving you wasn’t proven to make you feel any better but you did get better. This is the placebo effect.
In health care there is a fine line between what is ethical and what is not. As time goes on this line becomes thinner and thinner. In the article The Moral Case For The Clinical Placebo, Azgad Gold and Pesach Lichtenberg are two researchers that argue that there are exceptions to this fine line when talking about placebos. They specifically argue, “The intentional use of the placebo, in certain circumstances and under several conditions, can be justified.”1 The placebo is rapidly becoming a problem because it is now a commonly prescribed drug and many people have different ethical views on the topic.
The first major study conducted on the matter in the United states found that St John’s wort had negligible benefits on patients with major depression with no statistically significant benefits more then those produced by a placebo (Shelton). However other studies have “proved”, not only that St. John’s Wort is more successful in treatment of patients with depression, but that It is actually similarly or more effective than some tri-cyclic prescription antidepressants (Linde). The apparent contradictions in research findings are confusing and provide little help to a patient or doctor in deciding whether to use St John’s Wort as a treatment for depression.
The placebo effect has been observed in numerous studies spanning a wide spectrum of symptoms and maladies – everything from cancer to baldness and depression to sexual arousal. An early and famous story about the placebo effect is that of Mr. Wright. In Long Beach, California, in 1957, he was diagnosed with cancer and given only days to live. While in the hospital, he heard about a miracle cure called Kerbiozen, which supposedly had been effective in fighting cancer in certain cases. Wright begged to be treated with Kerbiozen in a last ditch attempt to save his own life. His doctor, Dr. Philip West, granted his request and administered an injection of this drug to Wright. Within a few days, Dr. West was amazed to find that Wright up and about, and even joking with his nurses. The tumors had spontaneously melted away. Then, a number of months later Wright read a medical report that claimed that this drug was actually a "quack remedy" with no real medical value. He immediately relapsed. Dr. West reassured him that the medicine was in fact very useful in fighting cancer and administered what he told Wright was a new, super strength dosage of the drug. Again the tumors disappeared, even though Wright had only re...
...reatly increased, and the results in treating disorders such as depression have become more dramatically positive (Gross 1). Unlike technology, chemicals such as those found in antidepressants cannot be easily altered. Complex biological processes often have to take place, and testing must be done on animals with each new chemical manipulation. This takes time and money, where adjusting rTMS methods is fairly simple and inexpensive to the medical industry.
Studies have shown that the use of medication works faster in treating anxiety than therapy. “Those given placebo pills reported early improvements in their depressive symptoms almost as great
cause the sufferer to think that the problem is over with but it actually has not.
Freedman B. Equipoise and the ethics of clinical research. N Engl J Med. 1987; 317(3): 141-145
Clinical trial is a gateway to become proved practical medical treatment, so it requires accuracy and validity of the outcomes. Placebo control trials are therefore employed in clinical trials as nearly half of academic physicians have answered in a questionnaire that they had used a placebo in their clinical trials (Sherman and Hickner, 2007). To have the higher scientific validity of results on the clinical trials require that prospective, carefully selected subjects and endpoints, a control group, randomly allocated subjects into a treatment group and a control group, blinded both subject groups and investigators, sufficient sample size, and an approved independent ethics committee and monitoring by data safety and monitor board to have stronger the scientific validity on the clinical trials (Brody, 1997). The use of placebos will enable to have more scientifically reliable outcome. However, unnecessarily or ineffectiveness of placebo use is also claimed therefore considering appropriate conditions and suitable cases would be needed for placebo use.
...ebo means that anything seems to be real but actually it is not real then, doctors create something fake such as pills, shots or drugs on people’s brains in order to heal a disease. For example, a pill is given to a person who has insomnia and said positive things about treatment. After that emotional effect and pill, person feels better and s/he can sleep well afterwards. In another specimen, people can