Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 174

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Placebo studies and ritual theory: a comparative analysis of Navajo, acupuncture and biomedical healing

Open access
Kaptchuk, Ted J.·2011·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Abstract

Using a comparative analysis of Navajo healing ceremonials, acupuncture and biomedical treatment, this essay examines placebo studies and ritual theory as mutually interpenetrating disciplines. Healing rituals create a receptive person susceptible to the influences of authoritative culturally sanctioned ‘powers’. The healer provides the sufferer with imaginative, emotional, sensory, moral and aesthetic input derived from the palpable symbols and procedures of the ritual process—in the process fusing the sufferer's idiosyncratic narrative unto a universal cultural mythos. Healing rituals involve a drama of evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation in a charged atmosphere of hope and uncertainty. Experimental research into placebo effects demonstrates that routine biomedical pharmacological and procedural interventions contain significant ritual dimensions. This research also suggests that ritual healing not only represents changes in affect, self-awareness and self-appraisal of behavioural capacities, but involves modulations of symptoms through neurobiological mechanisms. Recent scientific investigations into placebo acupuncture suggest several ways that observations from ritual studies can be verified experimentally. Placebo effects are often described as ‘non-specific’; the analysis presented here suggests that placebo effects are the ‘specific’ effects of healing rituals.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1098/rstb.2010.0385

Cites

13 of 13 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 13 references

Cited by

See all 174

Metadata

Authors
Kaptchuk, T. J.
Venue
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Published
2011-06-27
Volume
366
Issue
1572
Pages
1849-1858
ISSN
  • 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
  • 1471-2970
OpenAlex
W2108002918
Cited by
174
References
13
FWCI
5.58
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Placebo studies and ritual theory: a comparative analysis of Navajo, acupuncture and biomedical healing. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rstb.2010.0385
The paper
Kaptchuk, T. J. (2011). Placebo studies and ritual theory: a comparative analysis of Navajo, acupuncture and biomedical healing. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2010.0385

Data sources

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.