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THE POWERFUL PLACEBO
Abstract
Placebos have doubtless been used for centuries by wise physicians as well as by quacks, but it is only recently that recognition of an enquiring kind has been given the clinical circumstance where the use of this tool is essential "... to distinguish pharmacological effects from the effects of suggestion, and... to obtain an unbiased assessment of the result of experiment." It is interesting that Pepper could say as recently as 10 years ago "apparently there has never been a paper published discussing [primarily] the important subject of the placebo." In 1953 Gaddum1said: Such tablets are sometimes called placebos, but it is better to call them dummies. According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary the word placebo has been used since 1811 to mean a medicine given more to please than to benefit the patient. Dummy tablets are not particularly noted for the pleasure which they give to their recipients.
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Citations
Cited by
Medical Futility: Its Meaning and Ethical Implications
Schneiderman, L. J., Jecker, N. S., & Jonsen, A. R. (1990) · Annals of Internal Medicine · doi:10.7326/0003-4819-112-12-949 · Cited by 1,215
Experimenter demand effects in economic experiments
Zizzo, D. J. (2010) · Experimental Economics · doi:10.1007/s10683-009-9230-z · Cited by 1,194
A Comprehensive Review of the Placebo Effect: Recent Advances and Current Thought
Price, D. D., Finniss, D. G., & Benedetti, F. (2008) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.113006.095941 · Cited by 1,146
THE MECHANISM OF PLACEBO ANALGESIA
Levine, J., Gordon, N., & Fields, H. (1978) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(78)92762-9 · Cited by 1,094
Coping with chronic pain: a critical review of the literature
Jensen, M. P., Turner, J. A., Romano, J. M., & Karoly, P. (1991) · Pain · doi:10.1016/0304-3959(91)90216-k · Cited by 835
Metadata
- Authors
- Beecher, H. K.
- Venue
- Journal of the American Medical Association
- Publisher
- American Medical Association (AMA)
- Published
- 1955-12-24
- Volume
- 159
- Issue
- 17
- Pages
- 1602
- ISSN
- 0002-9955 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2017514236
- Cited by
- 1,842
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 27.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
