Placebo Effects: 2nd Edition: Understanding the mechanisms in health and disease

Abstract

The book Placebo Effects: Understanding the Other Side of Medical Care examines the importance and the role of placebos across all medical conditions. This book offers a comprehensive description of all aspects of placebo research, a discipline that is now becoming a melting pot of concepts and ideas for medicine and neuroscience. A modern approach to the placebo effect and medical care is emphasized and highlighted across a variety of conditions. The first part sets the stage for a better understanding of placebo effects. To do this, it approaches medical care from an evolutionary and neuroscientific perspective, which helps understand the other side of medical care; that is, the psychosocial component. In the second part, old and new concepts and findings are described, so as to improve understanding of the specific conditions treated in the following chapters. The third part is dedicated to the most studied conditions, such as pain, motor disorders, depression, the immune and endocrine systems, and the fourth part describes those conditions that have been investigated much less, such as the cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal and genitourinary systems. All clinical, ethical, and methodological problems and implications related to the placebo effect are discussed in the fifth part, whereas other conditions outside the healing context, such as sport and social psychology, are briefly described in the sixth part.