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Cited by 1,842

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

THE POWERFUL PLACEBO

Beecher, Henry K.·1955·Journal of the American Medical Association
DOI 10.1001/jama.1955.02960340022006
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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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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)
DOI
10.1001/jama.1955.02960340022006
OpenAlex
W2017514236
Cited by
1,842
References
0
FWCI
27.15
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

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.