Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 254

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 110 of the 110 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Placebo Effect: Illness and Interpersonal Healing

Open access
Miller, Franklin G., Colloca, Luana, Kaptchuk, Ted J.·2009·Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

Abstract

The placebo effect has been a source of fascination, irritation, and confusion within biomedicine over the past 60 years. Although scientific investigation has accelerated in the past decade, with particular attention to neurobiological mechanisms, there has been a dearth of attention to developing a general theory of the placebo effect. In this article, we attempt to address this gap. To set the stage, we review evidence relating to the reality and clinical significance of the placebo effect. Next we investigate the scope and limits of the placebo effect by examining the hypothesis that the placebo effect operates predominantly by modifying the experience and perceptions of illness symptoms, such as pain, anxiety, and fatigue, rather than by modifying the pathophysiology of disease. Based on this background, we characterize the placebo effect as a form of interpersonal healing, as distinct from spontaneous natural healing and from technological healing dependent on physiologically active pharmaceuticals or procedures. Finally, we argue that research on the placebo effect has the potential to revitalize the art of medicine.

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 · 10.1353/pbm.0.0115

Cites

110 of 110 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 110 references

Cited by

See all 254

Metadata

Authors
Miller, F. G., Colloca, L., & Kaptchuk, T. J.
Venue
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
Publisher
Project MUSE
Published
2009-09
Volume
52
Issue
4
Pages
518-539
ISSN
  • 0031-5982 (ISSN-L)
  • 1529-8795
OpenAlex
W2072633755
Cited by
254
References
110
FWCI
6.55
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: The Placebo Effect: Illness and Interpersonal Healing. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1353/pbm.0.0115
The paper
Miller, F. G., Colloca, L., & Kaptchuk, T. J. (2009). The Placebo Effect: Illness and Interpersonal Healing. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.0.0115

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.